Mindfulness without the Bells and Beads. Clif Smith
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to unconsciously overlook any disadvantages inherent in others' circumstances. For example, we might be able to imagine many advantages enjoyed by the children of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a successful business-owning spouse. Children of parents like that probably go to the best private schools, attend amazing summer camps where they continue learning and growing, and have allowances that would make the average wage earner salivate. They probably take enriching overseas trips and ski at the best resorts when they go on vacation. Of course, they also have their college tuition and expenses covered and maybe even get accepted into an Ivy League school because their father or mother attended and made a big donation. These are real advantages. Are there any drawbacks?
Children of the wealthy do not have to experience money problems. It's unlikely they've had their electricity or water turned off due to nonpayment. They've probably not had to decide which of their things they should pack as they prepare to move to a new apartment due to rent increases or job layoffs and they can't take everything because the new, cheaper place is much smaller. They may have never experienced the need to wear their older sibling's clothes so the family could save money. Resilience and grit are born out of facing and overcoming such obstacles and challenges, not by never facing them. These qualities are a big advantage for those who possess them and a big disadvantage for those who don't.
CEOs and business owners often work insane hours to rake in their high six- and seven-figure salaries and may only see their children a couple hours a day on the weekends. Is that an advantage for the children? Children's easy access to money with less supervision often confers easier access to unhealthy things such as drugs and alcohol. Can you think of any wealthy families' children who've gotten themselves into trouble or worse because of addiction? According to a study from 2017, kids in wealthier communities are using drugs and alcohol and drinking to intoxication at rates two to three times the national averages for their age groups.3 Is that an advantage?
Comparing yourself to people who have more success and wealth than you do and attributing it solely to them being given a better lot in life is like me thinking the runner in lane 8 has an advantage. They do if you look at their circumstances with a very narrow and one-sided perspective. I easily saw and fixated on how far out in front the runner in lane 8 was but failed to see that by being in lane 1, my distance around the first turn was much shorter. I saw all his advantages and none of mine while seeing none of his disadvantages and all of mine. Seeing in this way is a trick of the mind in order to protect a fragile ego. It's an illusion. It's very difficult to accept that it's our decisions that matter most in our successes and failures in life, much more so than the circumstances into which we were born. What you focus on and the stories you tell yourself have an outsized impact on the quality of your life. This is where mindfulness comes in handy.
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For far too long, mindfulness in the West has been nearly exclusively associated with spirituality and/or wellness. People seeking enlightenment or relief from stress, anxiety, and pain have been the primary audience. Therefore, most mindfulness teachers have continued to discuss mindfulness within that frame. That frame has been so narrow for so long it might seem that mindfulness is only for the spiritually inclined, or for people with challenging medical issues, such as panic attacks, paralyzing anxiety, and deep depression, or people who just want some stress relief. That couldn't be further from the truth.
I believe mindfulness today is where executive coaching was 20 to 30 years ago. Back then, no self-respecting managers or executive leaders would admit they had an executive coach. The fear that kept them quiet was that it might make it look like they needed a coach. Back then coaching was (thought to be) only for ne'er-do-wells who couldn't hack it on their own and needed a helping hand. The framing that executive coaching could help you go from good to great had not been constructed yet, even though, most nights on television, we could see hundreds of elite professional athletes such as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Joe Montana, Jerome Bettis, Monica Seles, Gabriela Sabatini, and so many others at the top of their games still getting coached. Eventually, the corporate world caught on and now almost all executive leaders have had some form of coaching to help them up their game.
Mindfulness is on the cusp of finally making that leap out of the frame that you only do it if you feel you are “broken” and can't handle the rough-and-tumble modern world or when the wheels are coming off your life and you're having an existential crisis. Having an “underlying condition” is not required to benefit from mindfulness. It can help you go from good to great when it comes to your performance, leadership, and well-being. Keeping mindfulness framed only in spirituality and wellness/stress relief limits its reach and impact.
Fortunately, there are some who have started to see this potential. Many in the sports world have dropped the term “mindfulness” and just call it “mental conditioning,” which has enabled it to spread widely across professional athletes. Some companies have seen mindfulness's potential for leadership and performance enhancement and have begun to implement programs. The Mindful Leadership program, which we started in 2015 at Ernst & Young (EY), one of the Big Four firms, has affected more than 60,000 of our people through their attendance at my Mindful Leadership in the Modern World keynote, our 8-week Mindful Leadership at EY course, or one of our other mindfulness training and practice sessions. In just five short years, we went from teaching to six people around a dusty conference room table to presenting mindfulness to our most senior executive leaders around the boardroom table.
Unfortunately, not all of the corporate programs are as successful as EYs. We began to frame mindfulness as an avenue to exceptional leadership early on and were extremely diligent about keeping the teaching secular. However, that doesn't seem to be happening across the board and it's a detriment to the impact mindfulness can have. Of those few teachers and organizations who have attempted to step out of the binary frame of the spiritual- or wellness-focused approach, many tend to continue to bring in spiritual accessories regardless of their audience.
Attending my first mindfulness teacher training course was quite a shock. In the morning on the first day, the teachers came into the room holding small bells, wearing Buddhist beads, and carrying special cushions on which they meditated. This struck me as odd, because I had signed up for the “secular” mindfulness teacher training. It did not take long to gather that this “secular” training was going to be deeply intertwined with overtly spiritual and new-age thoughts, positions, and perspectives. There were–I kid you not–even Tarot card readings at an evening event and scores of participant comments during the training were met with the response, “That's so beautiful.” If you want to turn off a corporate audience and never be invited back beyond what your original contract stipulated, just do what's in this paragraph.
I have no problem with those things in and of themselves; people can do what they want. I have read dozens of books and ancient writings on spirituality, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on, as well as traveled to Dharamshala, India, and meditated mere feet away from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, but in the context of a training program being billed as secular, it was extremely off-putting. I quickly realized if these teachers were to show up at my company to try to teach mindfulness, they would be bringing with them nearly every stereotype people often associate with mindfulness and mindfulness teachers. In the corporate world, where there is no place for religious, spiritual, or new-age proselytizing, this could be devastating, because it only takes one “secular” mindfulness teacher describing their “invisible connection to the divine energy of the universe” to get a corporate mindfulness program canceled.
The fact that so many mindfulness teachers and advocates seem incapable of separating bells, beads, and spiritual beliefs (and, increasingly, political beliefs) from how they teach and describe mindfulness is a huge problem, because it alienates millions of people who could actually benefit from the practice. Additionally, many people who put shingles out as mindfulness “teachers” have rose-colored views of what mindfulness can do. They erroneously think, and are purveyors of the myth, that mindfulness is a path to only having joyous thoughts, being blissed out, seeing rainbows and butterflies everywhere, and being happy all the time.
I don't know why you picked up this book, but given the title it might be that you've