Dave Kashen shares practices for staying present beyond meditation, calling conscious leadership an "off-the-mat" form of meditation. He does 10-minute guided meditations in a hot tub most mornings and outlines a four-step framework: awareness, acceptance, willingness, and shift.
But I'm curious, what other practices other than meditation, and perhaps meditation is the answer, help you get back to the present moment?
Yeah. So I know a lot of people who meditate, you know, and they spend their 5, 10, 20, 60 minutes on the mat, and then they go to work. And they're just, you know, like triggered by, you know, what people say, or they're a jerk, or they're people pleasing, right? They're not conscious, not present. They're in their patterns. And so, I think one of the things that really resonated with me about conscious leadership is it's like off-the-mat meditation. Right? It's one thing, and I'm not in any way knocking meditation. I think it is a super powerful— we could talk about it in different ways— way to build the muscle of exerting conscious control over your awareness such that you can notice when your awareness has drifted to the future or the past, somewhere else, and bring it back to present, right? Again and again. So, just to be clear, I meditate. Usually I go in my hot tub and do some kind of guided meditation for like 10 minutes. Most mornings, not every morning, I'm not as rigorous as some. It's 10 minutes, it's not 60. Like, that's just what I do. And my life is a living meditation. And I think that's actually what's made the biggest difference for me. So, the question, you know, I'll kind of connect this back to these 4 steps, right? Awareness, acceptance, willingness, shift. So, in awareness, there's sort of 4 questions that correspond, right? The first is, "Where am I?" Right? Like the awareness of where am I, specifically meaning am I above or below the line? Am I in a state of threat or a state of presence, to your question. The second is, "Can I accept myself for being right where I am?" You know, third is, "Am I willing to shift?" Fourth is, "How will I shift?"
