Build Your Bold Mind: Applying the Art & Science of Attention

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result, as leaders are more distracted and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. Today's episode, build your bold mind, applying the art and science of attention with special guest Chad McGeehy, director of meditation training at University of Wisconsin Athletics. We hope you enjoy it. Hello everyone, and welcome to today. We have all of you and a great, great guest, Chad McGeehy. For those of you who don't know Chad, I know a lot of you do your research, so you probably know more than I do about Chad, but he's a meditation teacher, a scientific collaborator, a trusted coach, working at the intersection of elite performance and rigorous meditation training. And Chad's at the University of Wisconsin in the athletic department, which is what fascinated me the most, where he became the first-ever director of meditation training in major college sports. He's an honorary research affiliate of the center of healthy minds at UW-Madison and the co-founder of Interedge Meditation. And no one is more excited than Jake Marks, who we've had on, who's our head of coaching here at TIGNUM, who went to the University of Wisconsin. And he's hoping Chad that you're going to just bust it open and make University of Wisconsin that leader, not only in meditation, but in sports in general. So welcome and let's jump right in. I had to be here Scott. Let's go. Yeah, so I know you work across everything from education to athletes to the FBI SWAT teams, to hostage rescue teams. And that's also what makes it so interesting what we're going to talk about today is how you bring kind of this ancient study of meditation and mindfulness. And then you bring it to this modern day that's so chaotic, so stressful, so crazy. But I'd love to always start with what's your story like how did you get to where you are because you're on your own bold journey and doing your own bold project and we'd love to learn from that. Yeah, so for me, I have been meditating almost 25 years and I came to meditation practice to handle my own life, to face it directly. I didn't want to run from it, I didn't want to hide from it, but I felt like I needed tools and frameworks to be able to do that. And I found that in mindfulness and meditation training. And I never thought I'd teach anybody anything about it. And then I felt after many years of practicing, like I was sitting on a gold mine, I had to find a way to share it with others. So I started to do that in my job at the time as a teacher. So sharing with kids in my classroom, colleagues after school, and then that expanded into a variety of populations, including joining, as you mentioned, the World Leading Research Group, studying mindfulness and meditation at UW-Madison, the Center for Healthy Minds, and being able to collaborate with best-in-class scientists, co-authored papers, so adding the kind of scientific rigor to it. And then continuing where folks were interested to bring this into environments, including the past 10 years or so, mostly in performance environments for business versus responders. Yeah, that's incredible. Most people go the opposite direction from scientists to practitioner, but you started as a practitioner, even self-practice, and then started using it. I can just imagine you in a school with a bunch of crazy kids running around, you teach them how to slow down, how to become more mindful, and then suddenly you're like, "Oh my God, this is magic. Where else could I use this? Is that kind of what your experience was?" That's 100%. I saw these kids, in a classroom environment, we just expect kids to be able to show up and listen and learn and read. Well, if they're completely dysregulated emotionally, if their attention is all over the place, if they don't have any ability to be present with what's happening right now, then they got no chance at learning. So I could immediately see that this training was foundational to everything we wanted to support these kids to do academically and socially. And then that's just continued, the foundational nature of this training in other environments, right? And sport business to go. We're not teaching folks to read. We're teaching them to do other skills, but we can't assume that those foundational skills of attention regulation, emotional stability, not believing every thought comes through our mind or there. We have to train for them. Yeah, so I feel like you just kind of started down the list of some of the benefits. So maybe a good place to jump in is, "What does the research tell us about meditation and mindfulness, and what is the research proving out?" Yeah, so this is a really interesting area. So to just step back before jumping into some of the exciting findings is it's early days in this field of research. And one of the issues that I see happening in the field is folks overstate the benefits or oversell the benefits. And it's important that there's a lot to be excited about, but there's still a lot that we don't know. So I think it's just important for folks to hear that, listen to that, and also make sure that where they're consuming their content around mindfulness and meditation is closely connected to science, so it doesn't get overstated. So with all of those caveats, there's some really exciting things. So it all starts with neuroplasticity that the brain is constantly learning. The brain is constantly changing. The question is, who's in charge of the qualities that the brain is being trained in? Do we leave it up to circumstance? Or do we take responsibility and train the mind for the qualities that we know are important? When we take responsibility for it, that's what we're doing with meditation practice. We're training the mind for specific qualities. So the benefits come out at a couple of different levels. One is what we might consider a foundational, other more applied. So foundationally, it's really clear by engaging in this training, structurally the brain changes, brain matter increases in parts of the brain. We also know that foundational skills like attention or meta-awareness, kind of the eye of the hurricane capacity, or prosociality, how we relate to others, these all change. And then in a applied context, we see all sorts of things like people handle ambiguity more skillfully. They handle their relationships better. They have greater mood, energy levels. So they're happening, the benefits across both kind of the foundational and the applied domains. And so it feels like a lot of times where it kind of goes wrong a little bit is the term meditation and mindfulness gets mixed together. Are they the same or what's the difference? No, they're not the same, but they are related. So meditation is more of an umbrella term. Meditation is referring to a way of training the mind. And training the mind, one definition of meditation from the Tibetan is to become familiar with. And so we can become familiar with or we can train the mind around many qualities. One of those qualities are the qualities of mindfulness. So the qualities of mindfulness include things like having our attention be where we want it to be, not having emotional reactivity, not only perceiving the world through our own thoughts and conceptual collaboration. That's mindfulness and that's a skill that we can train. And where it gets a little tricky is mindfulness becomes the foundation and is infused into all other parts of meditation. But it's merely at a foundational level and then we can start to train things like purpose. We can start to train things like insight and connection. So meditation is that more umbrella term and mindfulness is a particular quality that's included inside of that umbrella. So it actually sounds to me like a little bit of a loop like I bring my mindfulness, the ability to put my attention where I want it to be into my meditation practice to in the end result develop more mindfulness that I can take into the world into my relationships, into my sport, into my job, into my meeting, whatever that is. Does that sound accurate? Yeah, I think you're hitting on something really important here, Scott. And that is that we don't meditate to become great meditators. We don't meditate just so our attention is where we want it to be for the five or ten minutes of our meditation practice or that we have emotional stability for that period of time. We do it so that we can bring it into our lives. And that second part is really important and can be tricky for folks to do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm a more training orientation to this practice rather than more of a I just do this kind of on a self-care level to kind of you know relax at the end of the day. I don't really take that approach. which dig more of a proactive training approach where we're training for specific qualities in the same way that we were training for specific physical qualities in the gym, we're training for specific mental emotional skills that we can then bring over into the activities that matter most to us. - Yeah, I think that's so important because I also think that's where, I don't know if I could say meditation got a bad rap, but you know, you would see someone that you know that meditates 30 minutes in the morning and then you'd watch them speed eating while they're reading the newspaper, watching the news. And then you're like, but so how could they have practiced meditation and then be so not mindful as they eat or not mindful in the meeting? You know, their attention is everywhere and you're like, so can't just be a panacea, can't just be you do this tool. It'd be similar though probably to someone who works out in the morning and then sits all day, what have they really done? They've not allowed the benefits of movement to, you know, weave into their day to improve the brain performance to get blood flow to the vital organs to improve their concentration, all those types of things. So assuming that let's say we have people on here who don't even know what meditation is, would you mind describing like what a session might look like? - Yeah. And so here there's so many different ways to practice, but a foundational way that folks may or may not be familiar with is we're simply bringing our attention to particular aspects of experience. So right now everybody listening, I encourage you to bring attention to your feet on the floor. Just feel the weight, feel the pressure, bring attention to where your body's making contact. And that's with the chair, and then close, bring attention to your shoulders, to jaw, and then bring attention to the sensation of breathing. Don't have to go get the breath, the breath is already here. Just letting your attention fall back onto natural rhythm of breathing. Giving yourself permission, for the next few moments, all you have to do is be here and feel your body breathing. And if it hasn't happened already, it will happen that the attention will wander off to the future, to the past, random thoughts or memories. It's not a problem. The moment you notice your attention has wandered as a moment of mindfulness, there's some space. And you can choose to go with that thinking if it's helpful. Or choose to let it go and come back to the immediacy of this breath as it moves in and out of your body. And then letting go of the effort in the practice, noticing the impact, letting that impact stay. As I encourage anybody listening in Scott Uniken digging in this to it, it just kind of, what was that like? What did you notice? And I'm going to guess for many folks, they noticed their attention wandered off. And it's not a problem. This is probably one of the biggest myths or misconceptions of all the mindfulness meditation. You're supposed to empty the mind or blink the mind. And that's just impossible to do. The mind is going to produce thoughts, like the loans are going to breathe. What we're doing is we're training to develop some space. That's mindfulness. That's the meta-awareness to notice that thinking and then choose, do I want to go with it? Do I not want to go with it? Or something else that folks may have noticed is that they had some tension built up, maybe in their shoulder jaw, maybe somewhere else in their body. And by simply paying attention to it in this way, it started to melt off a little bit on coil a little bit. And then I encourage folks to think about that or their other experiences of practice and how that ladders up into performance. If you had the ability to have your attention be where you want it to be more often, that would make you better. If you had a little more stability in the midst of unfolding circumstances, that would make you better. If you had that ability to find the right amount of relaxed and alert for your performance, that would make you better. And those are some of the skills that we're training for in a meditation practice that we can then scale into our daily lives, the impact our performance and well-being. Yeah, I love that. And in fact, I'm going to spin a little question to our members, which we don't normally do, which is, I'd love to know if you've ever tried meditation. What were some of your frustrations, but also maybe some of what were the benefits you experienced? Like, type it in the chat. And let's see if we can bring that back. Because what I love that you just did chat is you brought this idea that your mind wandered, because you know it's going to, because it's a mind, and it's your human. And then that's where most people say, I can't do this, or I failed. Or how do I know if I'm doing it right? So I must not be getting any benefit because my mind is wandering. And then I talk to people that meditate all the time who are very experienced meditators. And they'll even speak of a day where they literally could not shut their mind down. And they say, like, that's part of being human. But then what they did do well is learn how not to get dragged into those thoughts. So not to give those thoughts too much meaning, too much weight. And I love that. And there's a great quote from Nellie Corda, female golfer. She won seven out of eight tournaments this year recently. She's now in the news because she just had a 10 on a par three, which also is amazing, which shows that we're all human. But she made a statement that I just love, which is the better I focus, the less shots I have to hit. And that feels to me like it applies to what you're talking about now. Like, why would I want to have more attention, more focus? Well, everyone's complaining about how much we have to do. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could focus better? We'd have less meetings because they'd be better meetings, more attentive, more productive. And so I really love that, you know, the way that you brought that in. So Alexi, I'm just going to ask you real quick, any good comments on some of the frustrations that people have had? Definitely. We're getting a lot of great comments. A very common one is that they find it challenging because we constantly get distracted by thoughts about my to-do list. Another one says, my biggest challenge was finding time or knowing how long I should be doing it. Another one, the few times I've tried, I just can't get to a regular practice. My mind races. And I feel like the meditation is not working and I tend to give up. One of the-- some of the benefits that somebody noticed are reduced stress, improved focus and concentration, enhanced emotional health, better self-awareness, increased attention span, and improved sleep quality. Wow. So the benefits sound like an amazing application of time into the practice. So let me ask you, Chad, how would you address some of these frustrations? Because I'm sure when you're working with-- I'm picturing you working with freshman college athletes and they're looking at you like, you want me to do what? And so they must have many of these same frustrations. Yeah, absolutely. I think these are common frustrations than anybody would have, whether it's college athlete, or a SWAT operator, or corporate executive. So a couple of thoughts. So I'm the first frustration on, is it working? Or I can't get my mind to stop going from my to-do list. The couple things. One is there's this seminal study that's been replicated a bunch of times. And what they see in this study is that human beings, on average, are paying attention to what they're doing, 47% of the time. So roughly half the time, we're not paying attention to what we're doing. And we all know what that feels like, whether we're reading something, get to the end of the page, have no idea what we read. Or we're in a meeting, and we're kind of getting pulled into distractions, not staying focused on the task at hand. When we see that first hand in our meditation practice, when we attempt to set up and pay attention to a particular anchor and mind wanders off. The science is also really clear that we can tick this number up by training. And even in the practice that we just did, we could see where mind wanders off. And this is like you're saying, so many folks get to that place where they say, I'm bad at this. Something's wrong. I'm not doing this correctly. And that's just the misunderstanding of how the practice works. Because in fact, the moment you notice your attention has wandered off, that's the moment of mindfulness. You should be celebrating that moment. And it's in that moment where you now have choice. You can choose what to do with your attention. And by choosing it to bring it back to where you want it to be, we should think about that as like a rep for our attention. We're actually getting stronger. That's the moment where gains are happening. So you sit down for three minutes, five minutes. And the mind wanders 150 times. And you bring it back 150 times. You got 150 times stronger. So that's just the reorientation. On the second question around how much time, how long should I do it? The truth is scientific, this is an open question. But there's really good evidence that says even meditating a couple times a week for a couple minutes, there's benefits. And there's also evidence that says if we do a little bit more, maybe we get a little bit more benefit. But the truth is, is the best meditation is the one you will actually do. So I encourage folks to start small, feel some of those benefits, and then continue to build from there. And the last thing that I'll say in terms of application is it's really important for everybody to understand that we do not have to do these practices sitting still. There's another huge misconception of these practices. All meditation training is just training the mind. Your mind is with you wherever you go. So it's possible to train these capacities like attention, likes stability, while doing other activities. So you could do it while walking, or while doing low cognitive load activity, something like washing the dishes, holding laundry. Can I just let my attention be with what I'm doing here? I notice it wander off to something, future to do this, whatever. If I want to think about it, great, think about it. If not, come back to the immediacy of the activity that I'm doing. Wow. First of all, my hips thank you for not having to be sitting in a cross-legged position. Because when I try to do that, I'm so uncomfortable. I can't stop thinking about the pain. So I think that's-- you just hit so many aha moments. And I'm going to apply it to one thing that I found in doing mental skill training for athletes. So an athlete comes up to an at-bat in baseball. And they think that they can maintain their focus impeccably for an entire at-bat. And that might be anywhere from three pitches to 9, 10, 12 pitches. And what we try to teach them is the ability to step out, allow their mind to wander, bring it purposefully back, and that that refocus moment is actually what the best athletes do. They know how to quickly bring it back to place their attention where they want it. And what you just use was meditation with 150 reps as a way to train that in a mind-gym setting, so that you now have that tool and capability in the real world. I think that is brilliant. Is that something similar that you're teaching your athletes and your hostage rescue people and SWAT teams and executives in the work that you're doing? That's 100%. We value something like attention so much. And what you just pointed to with the example of a player coming up to bat couldn't agree more with everything that you just said, similar with an executive, back-to-back meetings all day long or a SWAT or a special forces operator. And there's the demands of the job. And then of course, there's the demands of their life being humans and everything that goes in with that. And it's not reasonable to expect attention to be 100% locked in, 100% of the time. That's just not how it works. What we need to have skills to be able to deploy it in the moments that matter most. And the meditation is the training to be able to do it. If we just talk about it, if we just say it's important, that would be like a strength coach standing next to an athlete saying, hey, get stronger and then just walking away. No, right? Like we come up with a training plan, we program it. And then we work with the athletes to support them to do it. So we need to think about the mind in that similar way. So how do you do this with your athletes? Because it's funny, I've seen a lot of sports teams that will use meditation as part of the transition for the students from their school day. Now we're going to have practice. So let's take 15 minutes. We're all going to lay on the floor. We're going to place the music. We're going to just clear our heads, meditate. And I love that as a transition to be where your feet are right now. Get ready for practice. But then I see that the athletes then struggle, OK, where's my connection to my sport? Is this just something I did like taking a cold shower before I came to practice? So how do you tie it all together now? Yeah, so we do it in a variety of ways. So part of that is working with the student athletes to find integrated ways to bring this into their lives. So for example, one of the teams that I've been fortunate to train with at Wisconsin regularly for the past five years is our volleyball team, championship level team. And we started with some classroom-based stuff, you know, make sure they're aware of some of the concepts. We started to do some of these, what I call, base training practices, these little bit longer practices, similar to what we just did. And then think through what are the specific ways that we could bring these qualities into competition. So for example, the practice that we just did, we used anchors of sensations in the body and sensations of breathing. And so talk with the athletes, what's something that you could pay attention to in the midst of competition? That's happening in the present moment that would allow you to become stable, present, and focused. And the athletes named many things, including things like one athlete noticed that a volleyball player in between sets in between serve receive, her shoulders would get really tight. So in between every serve received, just bring some attention to the shoulders, maybe take a little breath in, a little breath out, let the shoulders relax, and then be ready for that next serve receive. So rather than letting the circumstances dictate what was happening in her attention, she took responsibility for it. So work with the athletes to come up with individual things that are going to work for them, and then quick story on how this shows up in this particular program is in the 2021 national championship. We're playing our rival in Nebraska. And we go to five sets, most amount of sets you can play in volleyball. And we thought we'd won the championship, right? Team storm to the floor. And then the Nebraska coach challenged the call. So our team had returned to the sidelines with confusion and baguity. And they talked about in those moments, doing the practices that we had trained for, feeling their feet on the floor, feeling the breath roll in and out, tracking racing thoughts and emotions, letting things settle. So then when they returned to the floor, they did so with concentration, readiness, and stability. And when the second national championship point bringing home the first national championship in program history. Now they did not win it because of mindfulness and meditation. They won it because of thousands of hours of dedication and hard work. What this training did was allowed them to have the skills to reliably unleash that potential in the moments that mattered the most. Oh my god, that's such a great story. It kind of reminds me of Mihai Chixmihai's work on flow. And everyone's always talking about trying to get into the flow. And what they often don't understand is the three key elements, the triad that's required. And that you need to challenge greater than the norm. So you just gave a great example, a championship playing arrival in a moment where we thought we won. And now we need this huge reset. So challenge is huge. But the second is the skills to meet the big challenges. And you just brought which I love. It's not just the focus and attention skills, the mindset skills. But in this case, they had to have all the physical skills to be able to play at that level or flow was impossible. And then the third was an interstate of calmness, who can call it interpeace, we can call it self belief, we can call it whatever. But it is that moment of where everything gets quiet. And I have my attention where I want it. And what you just described was how through the practice of meditation, you can now know what that feels like and know how to access it in your most stressful moments. How do you bring that like to-- I'm thinking of-- you mentioned a SWAT team person. Their motions are so high and they're racing. And I think of our executives in the same token. They're just being hijacked by their emotions. How do they find that interstate of calmness right at that moment? So there's a process. This is not happenstance. This is not luck. This is not like, it'd be great if I had these capacities or not. This is a process that we can train. And so to go to what we're looking for here, a word for what we're looking for here in those moments, to use the flow definition or the what you're describing in the moment, we want poise in those moments. And poise is simply a sense of calmness in the midst of a high intensity situation. Well, let's go back to the practice that we did a couple moments ago. Where folks would think about other practices that they've done. After doing a mindfulness and meditation practice, a really common experience is that folks report feeling calm. Their report feeling relaxed. And that's great. Well, that's calm and relaxed in a low intensity environment, doing a meditation practice. What we're doing then is we're training to bring that calm then into a moderately intense environment. In athletics, that would be in practice. In tactical, that would be in a training circumstance. In a professional environment, that would be in a regular meeting. And we developed the skills even more there. So that when the high intensity situation comes around, we're prepared for it. We have confidence. We work with obstacles to be able to navigate it. So I think we need to train. We need to have some sense of that process. It's not going to show up in high intensity just because we think it's important if we haven't trained for it. So some specific ways that that can look in those different environments. So some of the SWAT or HRT operators and shared stories of when they're in the bearcat, and they're rolling into the operation, all the work is done. All the training is done. They know the plan. And then in those moments, can they bring their attention to an anchor to just let themselves be stable, be present, be there. So that when the door opens and they need to do what they need to do, they're doing so with a sense of stability, a sense of connectedness, a sense of fresh eyes. and similar and corporate. How easy would it be for folks to-- you know, you finish a meeting, kind of roll into the next meeting. What would it look like, you know, walking down the hallway to be paying attention to the sensations that are happening in your feet as you're walking? Typically, the mind is occupied thinking about what happened in the last meeting or what may happen in the next meeting. And some of that is useful. We need to reflect. We need to plan some creativity. Can emerge. That's great. We can track it and go with it. Or, if that's not happening, we can just bring attention back to feeling those feet making contact, feeling the legs moving. So that that 90-second walk between meeting rooms becomes 90 seconds where you just train the mind to be stable and present and undistracted. And then that's the mind that's going to show up in those next moments professionally. Yeah, I like that where you start to infuse it into your day in the little pockets that you have. I mean, it's a big part of the Tignum strategies is preparing for these critical moments and being very intentional, you know, how do I want to be perceived? What do I want people to know about me? How do I want them to feel? But often what happens is the mismatch, but my emotional state doesn't match that. So I want people to feel trusting, calm, heard. And yet I come in and I can't sit quietly. I'm fidgety. I'm inserting my thoughts in between everyone else's thoughts. And then they don't leave feeling the way you want them to feel. You just added another element of just bringing a quick 90-second meditation to just calm yourself so you can bring those skills and those intentions to it. I think that's super, super important. This is about training your nervous system to be the intervention. This is training your nervous system to communicate the qualities that matter most. It's the most foundational level with which we can train. And then upon that, then we need to build technical, tactical skills in our particular environment, whether it's sport, business, tactical. But this is that really foundational level. Yeah. So how does like the work you're doing seem so practical. But I know there's many types of meditation, right? You hear people talking about transcendental meditation. Then there's different Buddhist meditations, you know, how do what are the different types of meditations? And are there different benefits that you get from different styles or types? Yeah, that's a really good question. And is one that we're just beginning to explore scientifically in terms of what are the different benefits for different types of meditation? I think for folks listening, it's helpful to have models that they're pulling from to discern. And one model that I think is really helpful comes from collaborators at the Healthy Mines group. I think it's one of the most important meditation papers written in the past 20 years. And lays out a model of four different dimensions that of well-being of performance that can be trained with meditation. And those are awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And so these are all different areas with sub-skills that we can train in each area that are grounded in both what do we know scientifically about this way of training the mind and connected to 2500 years of contemplative practice. But this really does speak to Scott in the field. There's no central licensing body for mindfulness and meditation teachers. Anybody can just hang a shingle and say, "That's, you know, I'm a meditation teacher." And so I think it's important for folks to make sure that they're collaborating with working with folks that have some some rigor and quality. And I think in the environment we're talking about, that includes absolutely the personal practice of the person teaching. You don't want somebody teaching you who has just read a couple articles or, you know, heard a podcast about it and is teaching you. This is mindfulness meditation. It's not just a bunch of ideas. It's an embodied experience. So if the person teaching you doesn't have that embodied experience, then you're getting a shell of the benefits. And then the other is that I think they need to be closely connected to science because the science is evolving and we need to make sure that we're getting accurate representations of the science. And of course, you need folks who are culturally competent people that will fit in your environment. You know, there's plenty of really great meditation teachers that just wouldn't fly in front of a, you know, group of athletes are in the, you know, in a C-suite environment. Yeah, I think that's what attracted me so much to you when we met was, being having been a firefighter and I could imagine if some meditation person came to teach us. This was also many years ago. So that it wasn't where it is now, the social acceptance. But if that person didn't connect with us, it didn't matter what the science was and it didn't matter what the techniques were, that human connection and the trust. And then also knowing the validation of a science, I think that's why I loved, you know, the work by Amos Yaw, you know, at University of Miami. And when I read the book, "Pick Mind," and I'm sure you're very familiar with it. But, you know, she was working with Marines, you know, and people who were literally in Afghanistan in battle zones and showing them the benefits and her ability to connect with them was just so important. Yeah, I think that's also important. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things there to just continue to add. I mean, I agree with, you know, having the right fit in front of the room. But some of the benefits, you know, they can show up when we do have that right person in the room who does have that grounding. So one, like with the, the scientists you just mentioned at University of Miami, Mishin Jha, Mishin Ayah are working on a paper right now actually that's going to outline kind of the foundational nature of mindfulness and meditation training in performance psychology. So stay tuned for that. But it's a lot of it has to do with what we just talked about. It is the foundation of, if we don't have skills like attention, meta awareness and desattering kind of have our attention be where we want it to be stability in the midst of ambiguity, not believing every thought comes through our mind, which we know from Mishin and other scientists work, those all degrade under stress. And everybody listening has experiences tremendous stress. So we should be training for them if we expect them to be there. And then the other bit of science that I'd be remiss about it mentioned is we just had some work published out of what we've been doing in the athletic department at University of Wisconsin, Madison. And what we see here is in these athletes and these high level championship level athletes, on the days that they do a meditation practice, they have better mood, energy level, muscle readiness and readiness to train. Same day they have those impacts. So if we think about those as foundational performance, foundational well-being factors, typically things like mood, energy level, muscle readiness, readiness to train, tend to go down over periods of intensity. Well, we're showing we can reliably tick those up in periods of intensity. And then the other finding out of this paper is the day after these athletes did a meditation practice, they had a reduction in the incidence of injury by 58%. That's a massive number. And frankly Scott, I think that is the sort of number that changes the way that sport is trained forever. That's incredible. I mean, it makes sense though when you just think logically as I would map it out, how tension leads to so many injuries and if you can reduce tension. Then also there's the psychosomatic causes, right? Of what our brain is doing. And if we can then allow our brain to also become, it would make sense that injuries would reduce, but that number is staggering. That's incredible. So it is staggering. So I agree with kind of some of the mechanisms you're pointing to. And we don't know the mechanisms that are at play. These future research we can explore, but I think some other things that are happening, you know, have to do with interception and proprioception. Do I know what's happening in my body? Can I feel it? Kind of from the perspective of the body. And with that information, that's data. Then I can do something about it. So maybe that is, I showed up my workout in the morning and it's just kind of, you know, hamstrings a little tight or you know, backs a little, you know, off today. And so maybe I, you know, work with a trainer or you know, a foam roller myself or maybe instead of an extra plate today, I just do a little bit less. So I was having that information is huge. And the capacities of this body awareness are one of the foundational pieces of mindfulness and meditation training. But so it's I agree. It's a really exciting number. And then it's starting to move us in a direction, whether it's the injury, you know, 58% reduction or other data. We're pretty soon going to be in a place where we can say with some confidence that if you're not engaged in this training in some way, you're leaving gains on the table. Are you okay with that? And of course, folks aren't going to be okay with that. So what we need to do is we need to find rigorous ways based in the science that people can actually apply simple ways, easy ways that they can begin to integrate this into their lives and then continue to do so and grow their practice. Yeah, I think you're already seeing a trend where, you know, you have people like LeBron James, you know, people like another quarter that I talked about where people are starting to see, whoa, I'm going to be left behind if I'm not adapting the most powerful processes, you know, whether it's mindset training, I will include mindfulness and meditation in that training. But all the little things that actually make a big difference. But what I hear from you is this is more than that because it's a foundation of which so many other things are built upon. And I think that's where people often miss those key fundamentals. Yeah, I think one of the cool things about this training is it will make other training that people are doing in their life better. It will support. mindset training. It'll support psychological skills training. It'll support physical training. It'll support executive coaching. It supports all of these domains in a way that I think is complementary to them. It doesn't replace or in any way it just catalyzes and unleashes their impact in either greater ways. I like that a lot. So, Alexi, I know I've done it again. I get in these conversations in the kitchen and I don't let that our guests get away to anyone else. So haven't questions from our members. Let's get everybody involved here in the conversation. Yes. I'm going to start with this one from June. It's very simple but I think it's a great question. She says I often hear pay attention to your breathing but I don't really know how to do that. Can you elaborate on that? Great question. Common question. So, one, first thing I want to say is that the breath is not somehow extremely valuable in comparison to other anchors that we can pay attention to. The breath is commonly used but the reason it's used is because the breath is always happening and the breath is available to pay attention to in the present moment. Well, other anchors can be used in the same way. So these could be sensations in the body. So June or anybody else, you know, maybe a more helpful anchor is sensations that are happening where feet are making contact or hands are making contact or maybe some folks like to use external anchors. What are the sounds that are arriving to my ears or a visual anchor we can choose kind of a visual spot. I look for something small like the size of a quarter and just let kind of eyes study there. And of course with any of these anchors, the same process will happen. We'll be concentrated for however long and then distraction will happen. We can choose to go with that distraction if it's helpful if we want to or we can kind of choose to come back. So that's the first thing is we don't need to limit ourselves to the breath. There's lots of anchors that we can choose to pay attention to. And then the other is like if somebody for whatever reason is really curious about the breath and wants to work with the breath is we can start to manipulate the breath a little bit. You know, like do things that have a little bit longer inhales, a little bit longer exhales, a box breathing techniques or 456, you know, where we're breathing and holding, letting out these different techniques that you know, add a little intensity to the breath versus just allowing the breath to be as it is. So both of those are good options. But it's important that we don't just get stuck thinking one technique is the only way to achieve developing the skills and the outcomes that were interested in achieving. Thank you. I love that answer. We have another question. Does the focus stay with you throughout the day? Like if I exercise, I know I have energy for the day. If I meditate for 10 minutes in the morning, does it stay with me for the rest of the day like energy? Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say yes and so there is some good scientific evidence that when folks engage in these practices and then we ask them to do like tasks in the lab, things that measure their attention, that the that that attentional capacities do stay with them after they do it. One little caveat here is when somebody is new to practice, like never meditated in their lives and we have them do kind of attention-based practices and then have them do experiments that measure their capacity to keep attention where we want it to be. For new meditators, we actually see that get worse initially and then we see it get better. And I think the physical corollary is really clear here too. If we do, somebody's not moving their body at all and then they start to exercise, there's going to be a little bit of like okay, right? Like some stiffness here, right? Kind of like working through the cobwebs, so to speak. And then as we continue to do it, those benefits really sustain themselves. Awesome. Okay, one of our listeners says that during the pandemic, they began taking midday walks without any distractions, no phone, no music, and simply focused on the sounds of nature and the feeling of the breeze on my face. I didn't realize it at the time, but I now understand that this was a form of meditation. Can you explain how such simple activities can be an effective form of meditation and how they impact our new rule of plasticity? Yeah, this is great. I love it. So this is 100% a form of meditation. And I think it becomes easier to see it that way when we view what we're doing with meditation through a skills-based lens. If we're training things like attention, if we're training present moment awareness, if we're training to not be distracted, we can do that in any form, including the midday walk form. Then we can be endlessly creative about how it, you know, we can integrate it into our lives. In terms of how that impacts neuroplasticity, it's important to realize neuroplasticity is happening all the time. Every single moment. neuroplasticity is the simple truth that the brain is constantly being impacted. It's constantly being trained. So if we go through our lives constantly, letting our attention be distracted by our environment, whether that's by our devices or others, then we're training a mind that is going to be more distractable. So by finding simple ways to allow ourselves to be present, have attention be where we want it to be, then we're training a mind that has greater capacities to be present and have attention be where we want it to be. So I think those midday walks or whatever form we're taking them are ways that we're developing those skills in a kind of seamless way into our lives. Thank you. Jim says, "How has meditation influenced your ability to make clear and confident decisions during significant moments in your life?" So I think many ways. So one is in those moments, there is a lot of natural emotional reactivity and a lot of rapid-fire thinking that happens. And so for me, what I notice is I can be aware of those emotions. I can feel the tightness in my chest. I can feel maybe a sense of heaviness or I can feel kind of the momentum. Or I can notice, "Ooh, my mind is just flying into all these stories, whether it's catastrophic thinking or comparing mind or whatever it may be." And so the ability to step back and say, "Ooh, this is what's happening. These emotions are happening. These thought reactions are happening without believing them has been huge." The not-to-nurtout-too-hardier, the scientific word for that is de-reification. It's the ability to have space and not believe that whatever's happening in our firsthand experience is the full story. It's just part of the story. So that capacity to kind of step back, almost detach a little bit, observe it, and then be able to reorient both to the values that I'm most connected to to God, my decision-making, but also then be able to choose the thinking that's going to be most aligned with the goals that I'm trying to accomplish. Rather than swept up into what is a natural, emotional, and psychological reactivity that emerges in those moments. Of that. Ross asks, "If you can share the most simple dose response protocol for some effect and also share the most ideal dose response protocol for the most robust effect." Yeah. Great question. Sides, typically, we do not know. This is really important. There's evidence that we can try different practices, but there is no perfect way to do it. I wish I could give a huberman style, do this amount of cold tub, this amount of solid exposure. We get certain effects. I just don't think we're there yet. With that being said, there's really compelling evidence that says, "With just eight minutes a day, after four weeks, we see both structural as well as daily life impacts of this training." So, starting small, finding those little ways of doing it, and then there's some emerging evidence that's showing that even by practicing, you know, a couple times a week for a minute or two, there's benefits that come with that training. So, I would encourage everybody listening to not look for the perfect protocol. I'd encourage everybody to look for a protocol that will actually work in your life. Could develop a training plan around that protocol, implement it for a couple of weeks, develop some community with other folks who are interested in this, work with a coach to help you develop it, and then continue to grow from there. Thank you. This next question is from JD Lake, and I'll say that I really feel this question as well. Do you have any suggestions about what to do about technology to build attention? I feel like my phone, computer, apps, wearables, etc. constantly boguert my attention even if I'm not not actively using the technology. Like I can constantly feel my phone in my pocket. - Yeah, this one is really important. So I think one of the ways to think about it is in some ways we live in an attention deficit society. And we have really sophisticated tools and really smart engineers and really unbelievable companies that are working extremely hard for our attention at all times. So first is do we have an awareness of being pulled into using our devices? And devices are amazing. I mean, right now, like just reflecting and appreciating the fact that here we are folks, you know, all across the country, all across the world being able to engage in this conversation because of technology, that's unbelievable appreciating that fact. So using the tool in a way that's aligned with our goals. That's aligned with what we're trying to accomplish and achieve an impact in the world. And then this is where the awareness that comes from mindfulness practices huge is we can just start to notice those automatic impulses toward our devices, toward our technology. And in that awareness, between that, you know, to use the Victor Frankl notion, between that stimulus of the, you know, device and then the response how I react to it, how I work with it, there's a space and in that space lies our freedom to choose. So that awareness, that space is something we have to develop and that's what we're developing. That's what we're training for in mindfulness practices. So in that space, I can kind of notice, oh, I'm kind of reaching toward my device or my mind is kind of reaching toward, I want to check what's going on on Slack or whatever the tool is that we're using. And then in that space, we can notice, oh, do I want to go that direction? Or do I want to shift my attention somewhere else? So it puts us in a much more powerful position. And then of course, there's behavioral strategies like limiting screen time or, you know, not keeping phone in the rooms or all those sorts of things. And those are great at a behavioral level. The contribution that mindfulness and meditation has is in your own internal mental and physical landscape. Do you have the space, the awareness and the stability to be able to choose the, inclinings, the lurches toward the impulses that naturally occur. And when we have that space, when we have that stability, then we can choose the behaviors that are going to be more lined up with our goals. Awesome. Okay, Peter says, "Love the way you described everything, very pragmatic, real life. Maybe meditation needs a rebranding to take it out of the non-must day perception. How could that be done?" - Yeah, Peter, I mean, if you got the answer, let me know, man. So this is a tricky thing because even like, you know, when I came into the position of Wisconsin, they asked me, you know, they created this position for me and said, you know, what do you want to call it? And I, you know, do I call it mental skills? Do I call it mindfulness? 'Cause that's a little more accepted. And really landed no, like what I, my expertise, both from a, you know, practice, training, contemplative experience as well as scientifically, is around meditation. So I'm just gonna call it what it is. And by calling it something else, I think it muddies the waters and makes it unclear what it is that we are talking about. So I think what we're doing in this rebrand, if you will, is simply taking these concepts, these practices and describing them and using them in such a way that apply to a more modern audience, or apply, in particular, in my work, in a more performance focused audience. So with that being said, does using the word meditation get in the way, probably for some people or sometimes? Maybe. But I think the people who are gonna benefit the most of the folks that are curious and interested in benefiting. And of course, conversations like this that allow us to get in there so folks can see, oh, it's not the, you know, Namaste, you know, like, if you saw a picture of me, you know, I'm not, you know, Tidei, you know, ponytail, and I'm not the anti-puboana, Tidei and ponytail, that's great, right? But that's not who I am. And so when folks kind of get that interaction, you can say, oh, right, like this is applicable to my life, it's pragmatic in my life, it's based in rigorous science, and other high performers are using it. Middle linebackers in the NFL, the SWOT operators to CEOs of Fortune-Viproordinary Companies. And this is a training that is rigorous that can catalyze your ability to achieve your performance in well-being goals. So we can't let something like connotations of a word get in the way of that, or folks that do, simply are gonna be left behind. - So many great questions, and I know that we're gonna get a answer in the Q&A after this, but I wanna come back to one last question, Chad, for you. You have this bold project that we started with where you were talking about bringing meditation and mindfulness to all types of high performers. So on your journey of your bold project, maybe just share what were a couple of your biggest challenges, and what would you maybe do different today with all your deep wisdom? - So what comes to mind for me is a couple things. So when I was first sharing these practices as a teacher, as a school-based person, I had an opportunity to join the research group that I mentioned before the Center for Healthy Minds. And I applied for the job, went through a couple rounds of the interview process and didn't get the job, and was devastated. Especially then, this was 10 plus years ago, there wasn't a lot of jobs to work in mindfulness and meditation. I thought, well, maybe that opportunity passed, it's not gonna happen for me. But it was in those following weeks where it became so unbelievably clear to me that this is what I wanted to spend my time doing. So I just doubled down, spending my free time reading about it, connecting with others, continuing to practice. And then after a couple of years, another opportunity emerged with this group, and they actually approached me to come work with them. And so that staying connected to that fire, to that aliveness, to the, you know, that thing that, not only personally for me, bring so much energy and vitality and importance, but that I know could be supportive for others, allowed me, I think, to be able to stick with that process through times of ambiguity. - I think that's super applicable to all of us and all of our bold projects. So I wanna thank you so much for joining us today in our conversation. It's been incredible. I love the depth of your answers, your honesty, your vulnerability. It's incredible. So thank you so much. - Thank you Scott, really loved it. Appreciate the questions from everybody. And look forward to more. - Thanks Chad, we'll see you all soon. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to the TIGNUM Thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other Thoughtcast episodes, please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with TIGNUM, please email us at [email protected]. Until next time, be bold, be more, and keep ruling your impact. (upbeat music)