148: Dandapani — Leading the Mind to Concentrate!

Concentration or the lack of concentration, compassion, empathy, these are all things that we struggle with. Why does it even matter? I mean, you could live your whole life without being particularly good at concentration, but maybe you'd like to be able to concentrate better, to focus on your work if that's of interest to you. Listening to this great episode with Don DePonti. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today is a newer friend, but I suppose one that has developed for a few years now, spoken at a number of business groups and conferences that I've been at and is a lovely human being to be around. Don deponte is on the show today. We're going to talk about focus and empathy and compassion. And I noticed that the CEOs and leaders that I work with at all size companies and I noticed certainly with the guy in the mirror that focus, compassion, empathy are all things that I struggle with at times and make me a better human when I when work on them and ultimately make me more effective. So I'm happy to have this topic you can hear. I'm excited. I'm going to talk about it, not let. Don defani. Don defani, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill. It's nice to be on here. Thanks for having me on your podcast.

So, guys, Don Depani is a Hindu priest. He's an entrepreneur today. He was a monk for 10 years, but he has a background in electrical engineering and, and, and then he studied under a Hindu guru in, in Hawaii. I'll let him talk a little bit. He lives in New York. He joins me from New York today and he works around the world with groups like YPO and EO and business corporate groups and that kind of thing on this, on this topic. And I understand now you're building a sanctuary retreat or something in Costa Rica.

Yeah, that's correct. Yep. My wife and I have a 33 acre parcel of land close to the beach in a town called Nosara in Costa Rica. And we're creating a retreat center, spiritual sanctuary with a botanical garden. So we've been developing that for the last few years and planted 1500 trees already and be planting quite a few more thousand in the coming years.

So one of my good old friends, a guy who I worked at a radio station with many years ago on the music side, went on to perform and record for years and when he retired, they built a couple places in Costa Rica and he's there now and I think he'd Be totally. I should connect you guys after the show. So talk to us a little bit about your background, your life. It's not a normal, typical kind of thing, electrical engineer and then 10 years as a monk and then this. And give us a little bit more of your life story.

Yeah, so, you know, I, I'm Sri Lankan of background ancestry, and that's my DNA. I was born in Malaysia and then my family migrated to Australia when I was a teenager. So I did a little bit of high school, studied electrical engineering. And when I graduated from engineering school, I moved to Hawaii, to the island of Kauai to be a monk. So I'd wanted to be a monk since I was about 4 or 5 years old. And you know, ever since then it was really a quest to try and find a teacher that could train me. It wasn't until I was about 21 or so until I met my guru. And, you know, I just, I just really took to him, you know, he. I met so many teachers along the way and my biggest challenges with the monks and gurus that I met along the way and spiritual teachers were, they were all inspiring, they were all motivating, charismatic. And you know, I'd listen to them speak, go home, tell myself I'm going to practice everything they said I would for four or five days. And then all the inspiration, motivation would go away and let's default back to who I was. And I could never sustain change, right. And that to me was the most difficult things. Like I wanted to change so badly, wanted to grow, but I could never sustain it. Well, it wasn't until I actually met my guru that I met someone who shared with me really simple, practical tools that I could apply in every aspect of my life that allowed and then also showed me how to sustain change. And that to me was life changing. And I think one of the big things also on spirituality, Bill, is that quite often people are just talking in this woo, airy, fairy kind of way and it's not practical. You listen to it, it sounds great, it stimulates you mentally and then you go like, what the hell do I do with this? And you can't apply it in your life.

Well, there are a lot of things that we hear about, that we learn about, we read about, and then we do them for a few days and then they drop away. And then maybe we read something about how habits can change in 21 days. So we keep it up for three weeks and then we go back to the old way.

Everybody's looking for the quick fix, right? And I just realized in life that there are no quick fixes, and everything just takes time. And, and what I learned, at least over the. The last few decades, is to just keep life really simple. Be super clear what you want in life, simplify your life to, to surround your purpose, and then figure out what tools can I learn that can support me on this path towards living a life that's in alignment with my purpose. And I don't need 1000 tools. I just need a few. I need to learn them, practice them, and master them. That's all I need to do. And I think so many people today are just on this learning bench. You know, they're just going from one conference to another and one seminar to another and one workshop to another and learning courses and everything and then. But never apply anything. And with my teacher, he was all about the application of it. So the time I spent with him in the monastery as a monk. So I left Australia when I knew I passed my last exam because that was his requirement. And I jumped on a plane, went, flew to Kauai, land on Kauai, joined this traditional Hindu monastery, lived as a celibate Hindu monk for 10 years.

Was your family supportive?

Yeah, they. They never said go, but they also never said don't go. You know, so they were supportive. But, you know, I can only imagine it was very difficult for them, you know, especially for my parents, too, because, you know, I spoke to them twice a year on the phone, so it wasn't so. Imagine raising a child and then saying bye to your child, knowing that you may not ever see them again.

Well, I have two kids who are young adults now. Think about. There are many of those moments where they went off to do one thing or another, and you're like, oh, it's very. It's very hard. But especially if they do something that's a little less traditional. So I didn't know if that was part of the family DNA or nobody.

In the family, previous generations have ever been a monk or even remotely, I think, contemplated being being a monk, as far as I know. But. So, yeah, I lived there for 10 years, and then my vows expired. I decided not to renew them. And so instead of going back to Australia, where I grew up, I moved from Hawaii to the mainland. US Traveled around for a little bit for a year, and then got to New York City, thought, perfect place for next monk. And so, yeah, I've been living here for the last nine years. I'm no longer a monk. I'm a Hindu priest. And just for some background for your listeners in Hinduism, priests can get married and have a family and work at McDonald's or Binod Entrepreneur, make tons of money, don't make any money at all. So it's very different, for example, than in the Catholic faith where priests and monks are very similar, where they, you know, priests and monks, we tell about lives, they live in cloisters with each other or by themselves. In Hinduism, priests and monks are very different. So priests kind of fall under the household like that. So I'm an entrepreneur like you introduced me to. I have my own business. I work as an advisor for entrepreneurs and around personal development, around understanding the mind, developing focus. I work with a couple of athletes as well.

Does being a priest mean some particular practice? Does it mean you lead a congregation or something like that or hold an office in an organization of religious practice?

Well, being a priest in Hinduism means that you've been trained to do some of the very basic rituals within a temple. So for example, you know, Muslims go to mosques and Christians go to a church and Hindus and we go to a temple. Hindus go to temple. And so I can conduct a ceremony in a temple. I've been trained to do that. I have done that. So that's, that qualifies me as a priest. That said, I do not need to belong to a temple, I do not need to have a congregation. I know priests that are freelance priests, Hindu priests, you know, that get hired to do ceremonies and things like that. So yeah, so my wife and I are building the spiritual sanctuary in Costa Rica where we'll also create a temple there. Well, perform ceremonies and continue to teach and do what I'm doing.

Yeah, well, it's just like from, so Kauai, right. And like a remote place in Kauai and then, and then New York City or vast in Australia, Kuala Lumpur, like those are all really different places.

They're very different. Seems to be heading east from where.

And now you have, you have one child, right?

Yep, I have a daughter. Ten, seven months yesterday.

Right, nice. So let's talk about the first idea here. Right. Focus. We struggle with focus. I'm like many people, not everyone that I work with, but many people struggle with focus. We can't pick one, one set of priorities for the quarter, for the day. We have trouble staying on task for things and then in this modern day there's more things bombarding us. Talk to us about that world.

Yeah, it's definitely a big topic to me and something that I've been speaking on for quite a few years now. And I've actually just written a book and will get published soon, and it's titled Unwavering Focus. At least that's the current title of the book. But the whole concept here in the book is that I start by saying that the reason most people struggle to concentrate is because we've never been taught how to concentrate. And second is we don't practice it. Right? So, I mean, Bill, if you look back at the time when you were growing up and you were in school, you know, did you ever have formal classes on how to concentrate every day? Like you had classes on math and science and geography? Probably not, right? Not so much. Right. But you probably got told to concentrate at some point in your life. You know, whether it's a teacher or parent looking at you and going like, hey, Bill, can you just focus for a second? And this happens a lot, right? So people tell people to concentrate. Parents tell children to concentrate. Business owners tell their teams to concentrate. But we don't show them how to. So it's almost like if I go up to a person named Joe, Joe does not know how to play the piano. And I say to Joe, Joe, play the piano. He's going to look at me and go, I don't know. So the first step in getting Joe to play the piano is to teach him how to play the piano. And then the second step is to get into practice because you become good at what you practice. And most people can't concentrate because they've never been taught how to concentrate and they haven't practiced. And I know a lot of you listeners are business owners, CEOs and leaders and stuff. And, you know, I would love for your listeners to ask themselves, have you ever said to your team, to your company, hey, we have this project coming up. It's due in two weeks. It's really, really important. We need everybody to focus. And if you have said that in the company or as a leader, then the big question you need to ask yourself is, have you ever taught your team how to focus? Because you can't tell someone to do something if you've never taught them how.

To do it, or if you don't know how to do it yourself, or.

If you don't know how to do it yourself. Exactly right. And then it's not only enough. It's not enough just to teach your team how to concentrate, but what's also important at this point is, after that, teaching them is getting them to practice it. Because if you don't practice it, you're never going to be good at it. And that's where it just all falls apart. You know, I think in. In the home and people's personal life, in the business, we're never taught and we never practice it, and then we struggle. And that said, you know, Bill, I think there are some people that, you know, naturally can't concentrate because there's some kind of physiological imbalance or something like that. And I. I don't understand. That's not a world I. I know very much about. But I would like to say that most people can't concentrate because they've never.

Been taught how to give us some practices or something about what does that mean, to concentrate. What do you mean by that? How could we begin to practice that?

Well, you know, I. I take people through a very involved process. And, you know, first by understanding how the mind works, we concentrate with our mind, so we have to understand how the mind works. Once we learn how the mind works, we can learn to harness it and we can learn to direct it. And then begins the process of concentration. And I define concentration very simply as the ability to keep your awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. So if I can keep my awareness on you while I'm having a conversation with you and not be distracted during something else and, you know, looking on my phone or walking around, and I can just give you my undivided attention, keep my awareness on you, I am concentrating, right? But as soon as I allow my awareness to drift away and get engaged with different things and people around me, then I'm getting distracted. And people are masters of distraction because that's what they practice all day. You know, I always tell people the law of practice. Is this a law I came up with? Or I tell people, anyway, practice doesn't have the ability to discriminate between what's constructive and what's destructive, right? So what I mean by that is whatever it is you practice is what you end up becoming really good at. So if you practice negative habit patterns, then you become really good at that. And if you practice something positive, you become really good at that. So if you practice distraction all day long, then you become really good at distraction. If you're constantly allowing your awareness to go from one thing to another to another to another, to shift around to get engaged in so many different things, then that's what you're becoming really good at. And the more you do this, the better you become. And if you look at most people, they're like a squirrel just jumping from one thing to another. And they do this all day long. And if you look at an average entrepreneur, it's 24 hours in a day. How many hours would you say, Bill, an entrepreneur sleeps a day?

Well, some sleep on the low side, like three or four hours.

And the lucky ones, the distributor will sleep eight.

But never more.

Never more, right? I mean, eight's great, right? I mean if I get eight hours to sleep, I'm. Well, I'm hit jackpot. And so it just eight hours. So that means they're awake for 16 hours a day. Now, in that 16 hours a day, the big question really to ask is, you know, how often are they practicing distraction in that 16 hours? Is it three hours a day? Is it eight hours a day? Is it 12 hours a day? And if it's 10, 12 hours a day, imagine if you were practicing something 10, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, after six months, what would you be good at?

So you could argue, right, Like, I know there's a time and place for the sort of the distracted behaviors that I have.

When are those times and place? I'm really curious.

Well, no, I'm going to argue for it, but I'm also going to support it, right? So I know that the sort of random connections that I make are part of what makes me an idea monkey and I generate new ideas. The problem is a lot of the ideas are useless and then I have to actually implement some ideas. But I, if I allow a certain amount of time for just randomly looking at a whole bunch of different news or websites or things like that, that, that is sort of part of my overall creative process and there's some unconscious thread behind them. But that, that generates something. The distracted stuff of where like I'm not focusing in a conversation or I can't stay on task when I am, you know, doing something I need to do seems to be a problem. Or when I'm like, oh, I'm bored, I haven't done it in this conversation, but I, but oh, I'm bored with something. I'm bored, but I. So I'm going to look down at my phone. I'm bored. So I'm going to check my social media. That's certainly the alerts, like learning to turn off all those things. I keep tuning and improving the alerts. Like I don't really need to see that now. I have, I have refined those kinds of things more and more and I continue to do that because they seem to add themselves back in.

But a couple of points here, right? One is that you can choose to focus on being on social media. So you talked about going on online and browsing websites just to get ideas and different things. So I do that from time to time. Sometimes I want to take a break from what I'm doing and I'll just grab my iPad and sit on the couch and say, you know what? I'm just going to go on YouTube now and just watch videos for 15 minutes. Right? But I have a fixed time period, right. So I allow then YouTube to take my awareness on a journey through the Internet and let them show me stuff obviously within a particular area. But if for some reason YouTube takes me and starts showing me videos I don't want to see, I make the conscious choice. I don't want to go there. And when my time is up, I say, that's it. I stop. I'm not going to do this for my 15 minutes. It's up. So that way it's a controlled environment. But if you look at the typical person, their whole day is just driven by people and things around them. So no matter what's happening, whether it's notifications on the phone, on your computer, someone talking to you, someone interrupting you at work, people work in office buildings that have open floor plans. People are constantly interrupting each other, going up to each other, saying, hi, hey, did you watch the Game of Thrones on Sunday? Did you see what happened? It just becomes a mess. Productivity plummets, efficiency plummets. It's so interesting because so many companies I talk to and I, you know, most of the people I know are entrepreneurs. And I don't know one entrepreneur that doesn't want to make his business more productive or more efficient. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, right. Yeah. Everybody, everybody wants to.

Right. But at least in a general direction, even if they don't have a clear.

Right, it's a general intent. Right. Because they know if they can be more productive and more efficient, the company, the business would do better. But where I think most leaders, most business leaders, most entrepreneurs are not seeing completely blinded is they don't realize that the one thing that they can do, they can create the most massive shift in their business, is actually teaching their teams how to focus. So much time is wasted in inefficiency because, you know, in productivity because people can't concentrate, they're so distracted. So you're not giving, you're not training people in the most basic tools yet. Companies would pay thousands of dollars to send them on seminars, on retreats, and, you know, learning programs, but you're not teaching them the fundamental basic things, how to stay focused on one task for an extended period of time until you, you make that conscious choice that you're done with this and you're ready to switch to something else. And if companies can teach their teams how to do this and help them to practice being concentrated, productivity and efficiency would just saw through the roof. And not only that, right, Those are only couple of the benefits of concentration. And there's so many benefits that would come as a byproduct of people being able to stay focused.

So when my, when I was very young, my parents were fun, interesting hippie sort of parents and they took me to a TM thing and I got a mantra, but they didn't then say well, you should meditate so often or use that in some way. Just it was like a kind of a one off experience. But it did stay with me and I did remember to use it from time to time when I needed to calm down or center that kind of thing. And then as an adult I've gone through different things and, and I, I've done a lot of work around mindfulness and body awareness and thinking about where my. But that, I don't know that that's very common or normal for a lot of folks. What are the practices that you would recommend our, our listeners do to begin to manage their awareness and concentration?

Well, I would say the first thing is download my online course on learning how to focus, which is coming out in a month only because, you know, I really don't know how many, I don't know of anyone out there who's actually teaching you how to concentrate. You know, you can go online, find tons of courses on meditation. I also have a course on meditation. I would not recommend that to, to your listeners. And the reason I don't recommend that to your listeners because what comes before meditation is concentration. You cannot meditate unless you can concentrate. Because if you're so distracted and you go and sit down and you close your eyes, what do you think your awareness is doing inside of your head? It's bouncing around. It's no different, right? So the first step is to learn to concentrate. Once you can concentrate, you can meditate. And a lot of people have the wrong idea, idea about all this, right? They think, okay, my life is so chaotic, I'm all over the place. I need to get some sort of centeredness, I need to get focused. So let me take up a meditation practice. It's actually the total wrong approach. You don't meditate to concentrate. You concentrate, then you meditate. So the first step is really learning how to Concentrate. And unless you go and don't expect a quick fix, right? Because, bro, if you take an entrepreneur that, for example, is 45 years old right now and who's never been taught how to concentrate, what do you think the patterns within his subconscious mind are? They're probably of a distracted nature unless he's naturally has a natural gift to concentrate. But most people are fairly distracted. And if they've been practicing distraction for the last 45 years, then you have to understand that the habit patterns, the patterns within the subconscious mind are distracted in nature. So in learning to concentrate, it's going to take a while now to actually learn, to create new patterns and new ways of thinking and new ways of learning to focus awareness and keep it on one thing at a time. So this process could take months, a year or two years, and it really comes down to how badly you want it and if you're going to stick with it. So for me, learning to concentrate is the first step. Then. Then you can explore everything else, meditation, whatever.

So how do I learn to concentrate?

I mean, I can share with you some basic things, but again, you know, like I said, you know, to listen, to practice. But, you know, ultimately I would say, you know, download my course or study with someone else, actually go through a process of learning because, you know, you can listen to something on a podcast, you can listen to a YouTube video on Focus, and I have tons of it on my YouTube channel, it'll be helpful. But unless you go through a structured learning, it's going to be very difficult to make change. Ultimately, you know, to give you a very, very short version of learning to concentrate, one needs to learn to practice doing one thing at a time, right? So with everything that you do throughout the day, give it your undivided attention. So if you're speaking with someone, give that person your undivided attention. If your awareness drifts away, bring it back. If you're working on the computer, then just work on the computer. If you're on Instagram, then give Instagram your undivided attention. Don't get distracted by Facebook or Twitter or by someone walking around your house. Give Instagram your undivided attention. Practice doing one thing at a time. Because the definition of concentration, at least how I define it, is the ability to keep awareness on one thing for an extended period of time until I consciously choose to shift it to something else. And here's the key point, right? For people to realize, you know, for your listeners to realize. Bill, most people do not decide to move their awareness. What determines how Their awareness moves from one thing to another is an external source. It's either someone or something around them is triggering and pulling their awareness to the next thing.

So let me see if I can map it back or connect that back to myself for listeners. So I'm having conversation with you. And during the conversation, I notice things in my environment. Something moves outside my window, my awareness is drawn. I see something on the desk, my awareness is drawn. I notice that I have an idea on something you say, and then I leap forward, and then I stop listening. And then my awareness is onto my own thoughts in my head, but not into my ears, to you. And so each time I notice these different things, I notice myself having that. But I don't have a. Oh, Bill, you're screwing up. You're still. You're such a loser. Like, I don't have a whole long conversation like that in my head about. I'm glad that invisibility to focus. Well, I bet a lot of people do, I think. And. And I suppose there was a time when I had more of that. So I. But I just go, oh, yeah, look, I. Look, I. I got distracted by the movement of the leaves and the. And the wind just now. And then I'll go, and. And then I'll say, okay, go back to Don Deponti. Listen to his voice, the sounds even in the room, the background that' through my headphones. Go back to the conversation. So I'll say, so the internal conversation is like, oh, there. I got distracted. I wandered away. Come back. And it's really as simple as that. Oh, come back to that kind of thing. So the focus is. Go back to the conversation. And it's more of like an awareness that my awareness shifted. Awareness of the self. Awareness, and then bringing. I'm like, okay, come back and like that. And it goes on like that. I mean, continuously.

But can I ask you, how old are you, Bill?

54.

If you're 54 years old and you've never been trained how to concentrate, so imagine the work you would have to do now, right? It's not impossible. I truly believe anybody can learn to concentrate at any age. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're 75 years old and you've never been taught how to concentrate, you feel you're a distracted person and you want to learn how to concentrate, I totally believe you can. Right? But the biggest thing to understand is that if you've never been taught how to concentrate and you've been practicing distraction, then you have those patterns, like I said in your subconscious mind. And I think that's when, if someone sincerely wants to let out a concentrate. Another thing, another quality or qualities they should cultivate in their life is empathy and compassion. Because if you don't have empathy and compassion, like you just said to me a minute or two ago, you going to start beating up yourself about it. And there are people and you say you don't, but there are people that do that, right? They're talking to someone, the awareness drifts away and then they bring their awareness back again and then it drifts away again and they go like, oh my God, I can't, you know, I just can't seem to stay concentrated. I'm terrible, I'm really bad at this. And then starts that negative self talk. So you have to take a bigger perspective. It's like, like if I want to play the piano, I'm 45 years old and I've never learned how to play the piano. So if I sit at the piano now and try to play the piano and I don't do so well and I struggle and I mess up, I shouldn't beat myself over it. I have to realize that I've never been taught how to play the piano. It's going to take, it's going to take time. And during that time I'm going to stumble, I'm going to fall, I'm going to fail and it's okay. So having empathy for oneself and having compassion for oneself is so crucial because if we don't, we're never going to grow because we're just going to keep beating ourselves up. And then how are we going to grow if we keep beating ourselves down?

Well, in the first level, my. So I think people probably fall into two different games. My is kind of an arrogant set point. And I, when things aren't going well, it's honest is like I, I'm like, what's wrong with these people? My first thing is not what's wrong with me, what am I doing wrong. It's like what's wrong with everyone else. So that's the arrogance of my first thing. But, but I think that there was less so today. But more often I had like an unconscious, you know, beat up thing. And there were things that I, I spent a lot of time working on the guy in the mirror until I could really just look at myself, be with myself in the mirror for an extended period of time with nothing that I couldn't forgive myself for, right? Nothing that I couldn't love. And that took a number of Years of work to get to that point. And I still do. Like, I'll still look like a mirror meditation and say, okay, is there anything I can't be with with this guy? You know?

You know, I feel. I feel like one of the first things to do on the path of personal unfoldment is self acceptance. You have to accept yourself for who you are and all of you. Right. And I think the big thing here also it's really important, is that self acceptance, accepting you for who you are doesn't mean you're condoning the negative parts of you. It's just acknowledging that all these things exist right now within you. You're work in progress. And it's going to take a little time, right.

Until I die.

Until you die, probably and reincarnate again. If you believe in reincarnation, you know, but that I think it's so important because if you don't own. And if you can't really own all of you and see all of you like you do in the mirror and you know, I spent years and decades looking at myself and I have no problem owning all the good parts in me. And I have no problem owning all the crap in me. And I got tons of crap in me. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with it. Right. I understand that. That doesn't mean I approve it, so to speak. Right. I'm okay that this is where I am right now. I know I'm worth working to change some of those negative things inside of me. Some of those I can change in a day. Some might take a few months and others might take years or even decades to reshape. What I'm not okay with is not doing anything about it that I have zero tolerance for. I'm okay that they exist because it took a while to create those negative things as part of my evolution. But I'm not okay with not doing anything about it.

It. You know, I used to read about like people doing supernatural things. And the one that really stands out is like levitation. And I every morning and levitate everybody and then I. Right. And like, like the. And like the cartoon masters that just conjure stuff and they wave their arms around and I would like take a course or do something. And really, if I'm honest and I wasn't so much, I just had in the background, like this hope that I would cease being human and cease having these human kinds of concerns. And then along the way, one day, actually there was a string of four or five things over a number of months that I realized, oh, I'm never going to be done. Like, I'm going to be on this journey. I'm going to be climbing this mountain until I drop dead. And so I should just get interested and used to it. And that was, I think, where this. And I realized, oh, I like doing this work, whether it's a course or a workshop or a practice or this or that. And I, I. And I finally surrendered to the whole thing. And there was an extraordinary amount of joy in the surrender to the process and practice of things. And today, one of my company values is never finished. And I have this picture of this exercise guru named Jack lalanne, who, you know, was famous for doing extraordinary physical things until he died until very late in his life. And rather than just retire on the couch and get a lazy boy chair and. Right. But that just inspires me to be that sort of human being that's always at work on something. And that in turn gave me a lot of compassion for myself, but then led the opening for me to become a coach. And in the process of doing that, I started and changed the way I was a CEO, because I became a coach as I was a CEO, and then I started to look around and go, oh, I see the struggle going on with this person. So now when I'm talking to somebody who's in the middle of a crisis or struggling with something, I'm listening to the situation and the words they say in their emotional experience. But I'm also thinking about what I are, what aren't they saying? What's going on over there underneath everything else? What is this person deeply committed to? What do they value? And those are the moments when I'm listening that I suddenly will see something unspoken. And if I name it, sometimes I'm wrong, but not too often. And then I name it, and then like a whole flood of things opens up with that person. Right. They have permission to for their humanity. And that's a kind of a. A profound level of empathy and compassion for the person I'm speaking to. But that started with me.

But, you know, I would also say that your ability to see that comes from being concentrated. Right? So one thing I say to people, and one thing I say in my book, you know, one of the benefits of concentration is that prolonged states of concentration leads to observation. So prolonged states of concentration leads to observation. So if you're in a conversation with someone and you're staying focused on them and truly listening and being concentrated, you start to be observant. And that observation allows you to see so many things in this person like you're saying, and then you choose wisely, choosing the right time to share some of that that then allows that experience that you described to happen, you know, and giving the person to feel safe and secure with you, to share more with you.

Yeah, it made me a lot more effective as a manager and led to my being able to coach people of a wide range like it used to be for me. I think for many of us that there was like certain kinds of people I was good with and, and many kinds of people I just couldn't deal with. Right. And now there isn't that. There are definitely people that take more energy and effort than other people, but there's nobody that's off limits.

Nobody that's off limits. You make a good priest should have like a build confession booth.

Yeah. It's funny how like a balance of that, like, you know, I mean we can teach all kinds of things about how to run your meeting and, and creating dashboards and metrics and how to set goals, but through all of that are these wacky, irrational operators that human beings in the system in the chairs at the desk.

And if you go back to the very basic fundamental need of a meeting, you've got everybody physically present, right. You physically force them to come in a room, to sit around a table, table to gather, to have a conversation. What's the next need? The next need is to have them be present. Right. Mentally. How are they be. How can they be present mentally? They can only do that when they can learn to be concentrated, when they can learn to concentrate, when they can learn to keep their awareness in the room on the topic of conversation. So Joe's in the room and Susie's talking. Joe gives Susie his undivided attention and everybody else in the room gives Susie the undivided attention. But if their awareness is drifting away, then they're physically present, which is not hard to do because all you have to do is turn up and sit in a chair to be physically present. But where's your awareness?

So most of my teams now have two versions of that. They have one, put all your phones in a box like you, you can't have anything at all. And then others who have note taking or things like that will say, okay, you could have your device, a computer or whatever it is, but you cannot do anything except take a note on it. And then, you know, people are self policing and with each other. So they, they'll put things into silent do not disturb or whatever and they'll.

Start to do that all this is great, right? The. And these are all what I call patches or little simple solutions. But with the point I'm trying to make, ultimately we're not solving the problem. Right.

We're not of the attention.

Exactly. Yeah. Because we're not teaching them how to concentrate. We're saying like, hey, put your cell phones in this box, turn off the notifications, shut down all the other apps on your computer, just leave the note taking app open on your computer. Right. So you're doing all these patches, but not you. But you know, a person is doing all these patches, but they're not solving the problem. What is the problem? That that person there has never been taught how to concentrate. Because then you can teach a person how to concentrate and you can leave everything turned on and they won't get distracted. Because I was trained how to be concentrated as a monk, and this is what I do now. And. And I'm fairly decent at it. You know, I have stuff on and I don't get distracted. I live in New York City, you know, and that's the reason I actually came. You know, Bill, one of the reasons I chose New York City is because when I lived in the monastery on Kauai, and you told me before, you've been to Kauai, right?

I lived in Hawaii for years.

Yeah. So you know what the islands are like. And Kauai is beautiful. So the monastery was up in the mountains, four and a half miles in, or four and a quarter miles in from the beach. Beautiful location, 50 something acres, right on the river, waterfall, extinct volcano behind us. You know, we monks would sometimes share teachings with some of the guests that come. And, you know, the response I would often hear people say to me is that, well, it's so easy for you to be Zen. You live in a monastery in Hawaii. How hard is that? And I could never argue that. And I go like, you know what, you're right. And they would say like, oh, I live in London and I live in New York. I run a business, I live in Beijing. So now I am an entrepreneur.

Isn't that weird that a Hindu monk is told it's easy to be zam.

It is a little weird.

Right?

But their argument though, right? I couldn't really argue with that. You know, it's like, yeah, you live in a monastery in Hawaii. I mean, like, okay, it's. Yeah, it's easier to be Zen. But now I have my own business. I travel around the world. I run my business, I live in New York City. But part of the reason of doing this is living here is that I want to show people that it can be done, that you can live in a city, you can run your own business, your own company, and still learn to be present, to learn to be concentrated, to be able to be give every day everything that you do, every person you're with, your undivided attention. And the benefits from that is endless. Right. So, you know, I think that for the entrepreneurs that are listening, you know, Bill, on your podcast here, and the leaders, all these things like, you know, putting the cell phones in the box, turning on notifications, all those are great. And I'm not dissing that great practices, But I hope you realize at the end of the day, those are just little patches. What you really want to do is train the person on how to concentrate, because then you're curing the disease. You're not just popping a pill. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And I think, well, what I'm left with that I would hope folks do is just notice how to begin to notice how much you're not able to concentrate and all the things that get in the way of your concentration and where you aren't managing that. It would seem. Seem that awareness of the present situation would be a beginning of something.

It is. And I think the biggest thing also, you know, Bill, just taking everything one step further back is like, why should we learn to concentrate? It was really interesting, actually. I spoke at an event. I actually gave a workshop in Moscow, in Russia a few years back. And it was so funny because just all gathered there and everybody was in the room, like, have a little introduction about who I am. And I said, any questions before I start diving into the topics? And this Russian guy looks at me and goes, why do we need to live a concentrated life? You know, why can't I be distracted? You know, is that wrong? Why can't I live a distracted life? Why do I need to be concentrated? And I said to him, it's absolutely fine to live a distracted life. Nobody's telling. I'm not saying that you can't live that. I just said, tim, this workshop is learning about for those who want to learn how to concentrate. So I'm sorry that you came to the wrong workshop, but it's totally fine if you want to live a distracted life. But if you don't want to live a distracted life and you want to learn to concentrate, then you should make an effort. But I think the point I want to make here is that why should we learn to concentrate? What's the Impetus. And I think for me, there are two impetuses. Want to learn to live a concentrated life. One is that we have one life and life is finite. I don't believe life is short. I believe it's finite. There's a clear, definitive end at some point. You were sharing with me a little earlier that sometimes you're on a podcast, it's boring, and you get distracted, and you're probably thinking to yourself, shit, I got another half an hour to go, right? So that half an hour is really long for you at that point. So life is not short. If that half an hour is long, then half an hour is long, right? So I don't believe life is short, but I believe life is finite. There's a clear, definitive end to it. So for me, get clear what your purpose in life is and then live a life that's focused and living a life that is in alignment with your purpose, right? Because at the end of your life, how are you going to look back on your life and what are you going to say? And for me, I want to be able to look back on my deathbed, to be able to look back on my life and go, that was freaking spectacular. And the only way I can say that is one, I'm super clear what my purpose in life is, what my priorities are. And then I need to be able to cultivate this unwavering focus so that I can stay focused on those priorities in my life. The second impetus for leading a focused life is that I want to assume that most people want to be happy. I think very few people wake up in the morning, though, and say, I want to be miserable today. Most people want to be happy. And I always tell people, don't pursue happiness, rather pursue a lifestyle where the byproduct of that lifestyle results in happiness. So what is that lifestyle? That lifestyle is when you design your lifestyle, you design the lifestyle based on the priorities in your life. Who and what's important? How do you know what the priorities are? You need to be clear what your purpose in life is. Your purpose defines your priorities. Your priorities gives you an object to focus on. Once you can focus on your priorities in your life, the people and things that are important in your life, the byproduct of that is you feel happy. So for me, I think the two greatest impetus for leading a focused life is that one, we only have a finite amount of time on this planet, so become super clear who and what's important and then focus on that. And second is we want to be happy. And the way to be happy is to stay focused on those people and things that you love. And here's the other thing, right? So if I love playing the guitar, this is something I'm passionate about. But if I can't concentrate, then I can't truly experience playing the guitar, right? If I love my wife and I want to fully experience being with her when I'm traveling, having a meal, going for a walk, then I need to be able to be present, I need to be fully concentrated so that I can be in the moment with her, so that I can fully experience her presence or I can fully experience the presence of my daughter. Right. And the byproduct of that is I feel happy. Right? And those are two great impetuses for learning why one should learn to concentrate.

So it's probably a good place to draw our show to a close as we get into the why, especially because I, as you started to finish, just a whole bunch of openings for things. I mean, the immediate thing that came to mind is how many people that I work with that don't have a clue what their purpose in life is. And we've done a number of shows on that. So go just type purpose into either our website@scalingcoach.com or whatever. And we've done a number of shows with things not just on business purpose, but on the purpose of your life. And that's a particular thing to get clear on that. I think a lot of folks don't. I know you've asked people in your talks how many of them have an answer for what is the purpose of your life and quite a few don't. So getting clear on that can make a difference. I'm like, oh, I'm going to a three day workshop next week in the Science of Happiness with Jack Kornfield and others. And I'm super excited about that. And I want to direct folks to your website as well to go and download your courses and read more about this because I, you know, hopefully they're as engaged as I am in the conversation. That's dondapani.org we'll put that in the show notes. But dondapani.org is where to get more information about Don Depane's work.

And I have the course on Concentration coming out in about a month on an app that I'm launching. So you can stay tuned to that. It'll be announced on my website and. But you know, I recommend, you know, just not just to sell my course because I feel, you know, I've literally put two years into creating the content for this and writing my book, which we've turned into a course. So someone's really serious about wanting to learn how to concentrate. It just takes you through a very systematic process of learning and know rather, it's not a 21 day thing.

No, it's a lifetime.

It's a lifetime thing. Exactly.

Yeah. Don Depani, thanks for coming on the show today. As always to our listeners, we're here every week with a new recording on something related to scaling your business or the leadership required. And I thank you so much for being on the show today. Find us every week at wherever you get your podcast or@scalingcoach.com where we have the whole back catalog of shows plus all of our tool downloads. Scalingcoach.com dondapani.org thank you, Don Depani. We'll talk to everybody next week.

Thank you, Bill.

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