How High-Performance Meditation Can Transform Your Leadership with Kira Leskew

90% of leaders are just like you, feeling stressed, overworked, and tired of shaking all those hairs off your hands after you just pulled them out of your head. Imagine for a second if you could get your stuff done in half the time with more creative thinking and a higher level of problem-solving prowess. Yes, I said prowess. That can be our word of the day. Prowess. Go ahead and give it a try. We do all this while uncovering the blind spots in our leadership and our relationships. And that's what we're talking about today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, a podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, customer experience expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you script and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

It is so great to have you along for today's Welcome to this episode. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, my guest is the meditation and intuitive master for businesses, Kira Leskew. In this episode, we will be exploring how the right meditation practices not only reduces stress but can also solve those unsolvable business problems, some of which you don't even know exist. So, stay with us. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to this podcast. In a 2021 Gallup report, managers reported that more stress, more burnout, worse physical well-being, and poor work-life balance compared to the employees that they managed. What are the impacts of leadership burnout? Well, you have slower and less confident decision-making. You have reduced employee engagement morale. You have a potential for poor choices and missed opportunities. And you have a ripple effect throughout your whole entire organization. It seems like we're all running at full speed trying to keep up with the demands of the day-to-day. But here's the kicker. It's not just a rough patch. This is costing you and your business big time. And that brings me to our Question of the Day. Have you ever noticed how much time you spend Have you ever been dealing with stress, burnout, or solving the same problems over and over again only to feel like nothing is actually getting better? If this question hits close to home for you, then you're in the right place. I'd love for you to be able to share your comments and questions. Feel free to share this episode on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and put your comments down. I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. As I mentioned, my guest today is someone who knows firsthand what it takes to not only survive in the fast-paced world of business but to truly thrive. Kira Leskew is a former elite athlete turned serial entrepreneur who has dedicated the last decade to helping business leaders unlock their full potential, not only through hustle but through clarity of mind. She is a meditation and intuition master for businesses. And what she teaches doesn't just stop stress in its tracks. It boosts performance, strengthens leadership, and helps you solve those unsolvable problems that keep you up at night. She's been nominated twice for the RBC Canadian Woman Entrepreneur of the Year and is one of only 2 people ever granted the privilege to complete the prestigious JONA program by the Goldratt Institute. So if you've been burning the candle at both ends, this episode is for you. Kira, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'd like to say I'm one of only 2 people that has a Jonah, but I'm one of only 2 that were allowed to do it privately. Oh, okay. So everybody else had to go to school to do it. Because of my ability to focus and other things, I was given the privilege of doing this on my own.

Wow.

As an independent study program. Yes.

Wow.

That's so amazing. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you serve your clients. Who are your clients and what work do you do with them?

Yeah. So my clients are typically business owners or leadership in businesses that are dealing with a lot of issues, which pretty much everybody is today. So typically they own a 7-figure business or maybe more, or their business is growing very quickly. They typically do have employees that are working for them and/or they're an influencer where they have quite a public role where people are constantly questioning their decisions and they are receiving a lot of feedback. Let's put it that way.

I've talked a lot about the impacts of leadership on burnout. What are some of the telltale signs that stress and burnout are starting to maybe take its toll on the leader and the business performance?

Well, first of all, today we grossly underestimate the amount of stress that we're going through. Because if you look at generationally, if you're younger, almost 100% of them identify with overwhelm, which is the step before burnout. And if you look at entrepreneurs generally across the board, even older entrepreneurs that, you know, maybe even as old as their 70s, It's upwards of 75% if you look at the actual physical criteria, the mental and emotional criteria of stress and burnout. So, but the majority of people don't identify it that way until they're closer to burnout really, or at least in the overwhelmed stage. So, what healthy feels like is you feel relaxed, problems are easy to solve, even if something really difficult comes up. Initially, you might be, oh man, I wish this didn't happen. But right on the heels of that, you're like, you start to go into, oh, I can do this and this is how I can fix it. It doesn't faze you. You're sleeping extremely well. You're not craving foods to top up your energy and/or to suppress what you're thinking and feeling. So there's a number of things that, you know, different people have different types of ways that the sort stress manifests. And of course, disease is another one too. Our bodies are far healthier. So, if we are kind of chronically having whether it's digestion problems, or headaches, or energy, sleeping problems, almost all of these have stress or a potential of having stress as being one of the key components of that.

So, are there any hidden challenges that most leaders face that they don't even realize that they have? I mean, You mentioned that there's the overwhelm, but it's not, you know, it doesn't manifest into burnout until a certain point. How do they know that they're facing this?

Well, a lot of times, if you're struggling and if you're feeling overtired, if you're feeling like I have too much to do, even if you feel like you're on the treadmill and you're handling it, it's a problem. Because first of all, you're not being efficient. But the other side of it is, and I've seen this like over for years and years and years when I've trained people to get themselves back to healthy, and there's even a level beyond healthy, which is high performance, which is kind of what we were talking about. So there's a scale like you're burnout, you're overwhelmed, you're stressed, you're healthy. And then there's another level above that that's high performance. And when you get to those healthy and higher ranges, you have the ability, especially if you're meditating, to see yourself a lot more clearly. You have emotional intelligence goes way up. Your willingness to look at yourself accurately goes way up, but you also have like a practice.

Yeah.

If you're meditating in a space in order to see those things and you have skills that you can actually do something about it, if you're doing the right kinds. There's many different kinds of meditations, but certain types of meditations that are specific to business success will do that. They will uncover. And just the other day I was doing a meditation. I'm okay. This seems to be not like— it seems to be a bigger struggle than it should be. So I went into meditation. And then I realized that I didn't have all the information and that there were some questions that I needed to ask that weren't obvious, but that those questions came to me when I was in meditation and they didn't come through thinking.

It's interesting because I find that we are in such a high-tech world now that we're forever being stimulated by the content on our computers, the contents on our telephones, We're constantly getting pings and things to push our attention elsewhere. How do you think that this is affecting our overwhelm and our burnout and kind of our mental disposition when it comes down to this idea of trying to figure out a more balanced approach?

Yeah. I don't think it's balanced approach. Well, it is in a sense, but that's not the first step. So, the first step is that technology interrupts. And interruption automatically, unless you have training, puts your nervous system into overwhelm because it activates the fight or flight response. Because anything that's an interruption generally historically meant that, uh-oh, there's a huge problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. And I'm either going to have to fight, flight, or hide. You know, I got to do something about it or take some action. But the problems that we're dealing with today, although they can be very real in terms of maybe it is actually affecting potentially your income, which means that it could affect you know, your livelihood, the actual stresses are mental and emotional, not physical in nature. So, preparing to fight back or run away is not helping you. What you need to do is calm yourself down so that you can put yourself in a high mental state so that you can tackle those challenges. And with training, you can learn to interact with technology in a way that it's not overwhelming. The other thing that happens with technology is it becomes addictive.

Yes.

And this is part of the stress response because, you know, it's like if the bell goes off and then all of a sudden a fight starts, every time the bell goes off, you think, I'm going to get hit, right? So, the technology's kind of trained us to go back to it that because of that fight-or-flight response being activated in the mind, as well as the device is actually trying to get your attention, it's interrupting you. Which is creating that stress response. So, there's a number of reasons why the, among others, why the technology is addictive and addictive specifically to creating more overwhelm.

Yeah. And it's funny because when you talk to people about it, they say, I'm not addicted, right? I just like doing it. And it's like, well, isn't that the definition of addiction? At the time, it feels good.

Exactly. Like you can say, if people weren't addicted, They would give it up. They would say, I can turn it off for a few hours or not look at it every single time, right?

Yes. Yeah. Well, it's funny. I just talked to a client who's on a 21-day screen cleanse with her son. And I thought that was, you know, quite good that, you know, that she's actually being intentional with it with her kids to be able to see, you know, what effect will this have over a 3-week period to, to do a screen cleanse. And then she wants to use that lesson to kind of mandate how they as a family will continue forward.

Yes.

Yeah.

So there's a ton of research on this and I, you know, very interested to hear what the results are, but we see a lot of kids today because their brains develop different. They have different ranges in terms of, you know, the types of brainwaves that they have. So that, and that's designed so that they could learn faster, but it also makes it so the technology interferes with their brains to a higher degree than it does for adults.

I bet. Everything we've been talking about so far, how does all this impact the decision-making and the kind of emotional stability leaders are capable of having? Like, how is this affecting kind of their, well, essentially their performance, right?

Well, it affects mentally, emotionally, and physically are the main ones. So, let's look at mentally first. So, if you are stressed, you are throwing out a huge percentage of your mental ability. So on some things it's as little as 10% and other things, I'm actually going to say it's over 100% because you actually go so far backwards that it's a bigger detriment than not having it at all. So the things that are hurt the most are problem solving and creativity from the mental side. Memory is greatly impacted, so your ability to learn new things, but it's really when you come up against something that you haven't encountered before and you need to think in an innovative way and think outside of the box that you lose that ability or it's greatly diminished. So even if you do come up with a solution, it might not be the best one. If we look at the emotional side, someone who is overwhelmed, they lose 40% of their emotional intelligence. So if you're in business, you own your own business, it really is about those relationships. So if you're in a stressed or overwhelmed state, you're misinterpreting people almost continuously to a certain degree. And imagine if you could have all of that back. Now, so many people today, depending on what the age they're at, They may never have experienced the full level of what they're capable of, their emotional intelligence, because they've been some degree of stress or overwhelmed their whole lives. And burnout, it gets even worse if you get to that level. So you have all those emotional abilities back. So a lot of times I've trained so many people. And by the way, this doesn't take very much time to turn this around. We're talking about minutes per day here. Like, it's not like you need to meditate for hours. You can if you want to, but you don't need to, to return this to healthy. I've trained so many people where they're just like, oh, this— my team is bugging me to do this, or this person wants this from me, and oh, it's just horrible. And then they learn the techniques to get back to healthy and they're like, this is a huge opportunity. This isn't a negative at all. It's because when they're in an overwhelmed state, they're completely missing interpreting what's going on. And when you can turn that around and add on top of that the fact that now you've got better focus, now you've got your memories better, and you have all these other creativity and other skills that are going to help you in your business, it's this huge leverage forward in order to be able to not only do things, accomplish goals, but do them better, faster, easier than you may have been used I love that.

I'd really love to dig into some of the solutions for combating this idea of overwhelm and burnout within leadership. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I am speaking with the meditation and intuition master for business, Kira Leskew. Kira, if people are feeling kind of that this is their normal, like I know that baby boomers especially, 20, 30 years ago was, you know, just pull up your bootstraps and just get over it kind of mindset. What are the long-term consequences of ignoring things like stress and burnout in our leadership? How does that ripple across the entire organization?

Well, I'll tell you, our youngest generation is telling us what happens. Because if we look at like the stress levels, if you look at boomers, there were a certain percentage of them that were stressed. Gen X, that number went up and the severity of stress went up. With millennials, the severity of the stress went up and the percentage of them with stress went up. And now we have Gen X where 28% of them, I think it was the recent study I saw, say they literally cannot function. They cannot do their jobs and they cannot work. So that's one of the things that happens. And then we also saw that people that allow burnout to get to that level, you can become depressed, you can become suicidal. You cannot solve problems. I know people that have been on the verge of losing businesses before they finally decide to deal with this and we help them turn it around. And then, and this was my story too. Like I was so burnt out that I almost was in a car accident because I was too tired to drive. And then I was like, I need to do something about this or I'm not, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be here, nevermind being good to anybody. But a lot of people, it's either illness. Or they just can't handle it. The business problems get so big that the business can't make it. And it's unfortunate because it's very easy to turn it around. It really is. Yeah.

So, let's— why don't we talk about some solutions? What exactly is high-performance meditation and how does it kind of differ from kind of the traditional mindfulness practices that people are constantly talking about?

Yeah. So, mindfulness is like, first of all, there's more than 70 different styles of meditation. So, What we teach is meditation. If you're already to the overwhelmed state, if you don't have a background in it, it's probably too hard to do. So we have 5 practices that we start with that are much easier and that target specifically the stress, overwhelm, and burnout response and turn that around to healthy first. And then that puts people in a state where they actually have the ability to learn some of the other and reclaim a lot of the things that they've lost. through being chronically stressed and overwhelmed and get that, start building up some of those skills so that they can get to the level and do it quickly where they can start to receive knowledge about themselves, knowledge about others, that self-awareness and other awareness that is really going to help them be the leaders and discover the blind spots that they weren't even aware that they had that are really getting in their way.

Yeah. I was really amazed in your notes that you sent me that high-performance meditation can reduce work hours while increasing productivity. Can, can you walk us through how that works?

Okay. So first of all, of course, the improvement depends where you're starting from, but the majority of people today have had some degree of stress or overwhelm. But even if you haven't, most people do not have a focused mind. So one of the reasons why you're able to get things done a lot faster is Your mind is scattered and it's taking breaks. And you don't know that that's happening. So, you know, it's kind of like if you're not fit at all and then you get in shape, you can do a lot more, a lot easier, right? So it's training the mind from that perspective. But then there's also the awareness part to it where you're starting to be able to look at yourself in a neutral mind objectively, as well as look at others in a neutral mind objectively. So you're getting all these preconceived ideas out of the way that may not be accurate, but you'll also see if they are accurate. So, you start to have discernment around that, and then it opens the door for innovation and creativity. So, that happens when we give ourselves generally a bit of space. It makes that a lot easier to do.

And so, what does it look like when somebody is doing high-performance meditation rather than just sitting in their chair thinking their thoughts? What are the components of that that you've been able to outline?

Well, we lead people through a number of practices, like from a beginner level all the way up to beyond expert level if they want to do that. What we do differently with high-performance meditation is that we— I figured out, because I have a background as an elite athlete as well, so I took all the things that I learned about training and sport and how to improve and train And I applied it to meditation so that I looked at what are the barriers that are getting in people's way of doing these practices and how can we shorten the time? This is also my training as a Jonah, by the way. How can we shorten the time that people can get the outcomes of these without having to do what I did, which was like 2.5 hours or more a day with the practices to get the outcomes? So I looked at, you know, how can we arrange different practices in an order that leverages that so that people can do it in a timeframe that's reasonable for someone that's an entrepreneur.

It really is fascinating because it's reminding me of like the Stephen Covey story about sharpen the saw, about, you know, he talks about the story about the lumberjack is there sawing a tree down and he's there for hours and hours and hours and somebody's watching him and the lumberjack's obviously getting frustrated. And the gentleman says to the lumberjack, why don't you sharpen the saw? He says, I have no time. I have to cut down this tree. And so really what you're talking about is kind of that aspect of almost like sharpening the saw mentally so that your mind and your ability to be able to see things, witness things, being able to make decisions and so on happens so much faster.

Yes. And we see things that we don't see because when the mind is overwhelmed, the solutions that come are solutions that match overwhelm for the most part.

Which are band-aids.

Or that are hard.

Okay.

Sometimes they're actually good ideas. I've seen people, well, that's a good idea, but that's a really hard way Gotcha. It's like they're going to A to B through going through C to Z, right?

Gotcha.

They're doing 25 extra steps when they don't have to.

Right. This is absolutely fascinating. Kira, before we continue, could you just, for people tuned in who this might be resonating with, could you just let them know how they can get in contact with you? Because I think this is a good time to maybe clue them in.

I say the best way, if you think that this applies to you, you want to just talk about it, learn about it a little more, connect with me on LinkedIn. You can just look up Kiralescu, or I'm not sure how you're sharing links, but LinkedIn Kiralescu. I'm the— I should be the only one.

Well, you are unique. Let's just put it that way. So, I'm really kind of excited about this idea of high-performance meditation. You say it starts at a beginner level and it works its way up. When somebody works with you kind of from the ground floor of, I'm overwhelmed, I know I'm bordering on burnout, what can they expect? Like at a beginning level, what can they expect as an outcome? for a beginning level versus the people who are maybe more practiced in it?

Yeah. So first of all, again, I take my— took my sports background to how to do this. So the first objective is to stop the stress and overwhelm response. So the practices focus on that. And the majority of it is short practices. We start with 7 minutes per day and we teach people how to interrupt the cycle and to do that with little bits. throughout the day. So, a 7-minute practice and then a few minutes maybe here and there throughout the day. I also set it up so that we do short classes together. Sometimes we start at 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and we do it multiple times per week. So, not only are people having, you know, a short practice, but we're increasing it more often, which is helping them get in shape faster, but it's also forming the habit. With somebody that is there with you. So every class, unless, you know, something has gone wrong and we need to troubleshoot something, but every class will be progressive and then increase. And then as people learn that, when we add to it practices and techniques that start to teach them the meditation aspect and controlling their mind once they're in a healthy state, or they have enough percentage of their time where they're in a healthy state so that it is easier to do. Meditation is, unless you're already very good at it, is very difficult to do. And it can be very frustrating if you are already anything, I'd say mild stress, it's possible. But if it's more than that, it can be, people tell me, I can't do it, it's too hard. And they're telling the truth. It is too hard given their experience level and given how, you know, what the stress response is. So we make it easy so they can do it.

I love that. I was just in a discussion with my mom who said that she We talked about the episode that I was going to be doing with you about meditation. She's like, oh, I can't do meditation. I can't, I can't sit and concentrate on one thing. My mind goes all over the place. And, and so she's convinced that she can't meditate.

Right.

And so is that something you come across quite a bit?

Yeah, it is. So that's why we, we start with things that are far easier to do that people actually can do. And then they can start to see some improvement. And it's kind of like if someone wants to learn to run, but they're so out of shape that it's hard to get out of bed. Like, don't talk about running. Like, let's help you get to your chair. Let's help you be able to walk around the room. Let's help you be able to walk to the end of the block. And then the next thing you're like, hey, you know what? Maybe I can run.

Yeah.

So that's kind of how we do it. 'Cause people are so, especially with the levels of overwhelm, stress, and burnout, people are so far from being able to do that. We're giving them a path where they can get to being healthy enough to do that. Pretty quickly.

That makes perfect sense. And it's, and again, using the fact that you were an elite athlete, being able to train into something that made perfect sense. In fact, in my head, when you were talking about it, I was thinking about, you know, somebody who doesn't do a lot of walking, all of a sudden being told, hey, we'd like to enter you in a marathon. And first thought is, I can barely get to the end of my block. What do you mean run a marathon? And then you picked it up beautifully by saying that it's all about baby steps of being able to do what you can do. And then pushing yourself just a little bit further along that track to the point where now you're not walking to the end of the block. You're jogging to the end of the block and so on.

Yeah.

And the way we design the practice is they're seeing success every day. And it's building and they can see it. So, it becomes self-motivating, right?

Yeah.

So, you don't have to wait months before you see it working.

As I was researching our episode today, I really love the idea, this idea of being able to remove blind spots in leadership. One of the challenges I find when I walk in and talk with entrepreneurs is that they see things from a very closed bubble of their reality. How does this high-performance meditation remove those blind spots so that they can be better leaders and be better in relationships?

Well, there's a few ways that that happens, and that's actually the function of most traditional meditations, is it, it removes blind spots. So it brings you to a state where you— because we're kind of born with blind spots, we learn them, and it's really part of consciousness or the way the mind functions. So there's a couple of ways that happens. The actual meditation practices, when you get advanced enough, will start to remove that so that you are looking at things from a more neutral perspective. But there's also the being able to be neutral and to taking— being able to take yourself out of a situation. So there's 2 different aspects. To it, because sometimes we can have the ability, if it's somebody else, to see it clearly, but not apply it to ourselves. But then sometimes we can't see it when other people are doing it either. So I was training one entrepreneur who had a sizable business, and he had this issue that was going on with some of the more senior people on his team, people that had been there for a long time. And he thought, oh, this is a really good thing, what they're doing. And then as he started to learn the more advanced meditations, he started to realize, hey, wait a second, this is actually why our sales are sliding and they're not growing the way I know that they should be given the opportunities that we have and all the other things that we've been doing to create opportunities in the business. And he also saw in meditation how to go about changing that. And what he, how he needed to talk to this person differently, what structural differences needed to be done in the business, how he needed to interact with other people on the team differently. And a whole bunch of things that it was probably about 7 different points that of things. Now he had a pretty large business, but about 7 different points of things that he needed to do differently, especially in how he was leading and allowing other leaders to lead. And when he did those things, the business turned around tremendously and it was way less work for him. And he came from burnout. He wasn't quite burnt out yet, but had he gone on another couple months, he probably would have been very sick from burnout.

I can imagine that some people who might be tuning into this episode would turn around and go, oh my God, I'm just so busy though. I have no time to meditate and sit around. Even if you tell me it will help me, That thing of being too busy or already overwhelmed, how does one make a business case for being, okay, Steve, slow down.

Overwhelm is costing you 5 hours a day. Okay, so this is what, if you only take time off and you're overwhelmed and you don't do anything to reverse the overwhelm, it's probably not going to help you.

Yeah.

But if you take the time and it doesn't take a lot of time, like I said, You can do it with personal practice, like starting at 7 minutes per day, sessions are 20 minutes per day. When you start to do that and turn the overwhelm around, you are now creating 5 hours per day minimum for yourself that you didn't have previously. And it's because your mind is working differently, your emotional intelligence is different, and all these different things add up so that now you can take— and I have like so many stories. Of people. Like, I've had one senior executive tell me she was working 13 hours a day. And once she got to the level where she was healthy, she's like, my job takes 3 hours a day. I'm here 13 hours. Almost everything we're doing is waste and it's not even achieving the goals that my division is being asked to achieve. And then through continuing the practice and getting more advanced at it, she was able to come to a place in meditation where she was able to see what those things were, as well as how to navigate it. with the other people in leadership, 2 years later, she was 2 jobs up from the one she was then and working, you know, 6 to 7 hours per day, going home for dinner every day.

Amazing. What I love about that as well, though, is it's, it's this idea of not only using the tool of high-performance meditation, but the intentionality behind it all, I think, is really magical. It's like it— what you're telling me is it really changes How intentional we are with what we do with our time.

It changes how you think about things. But the things that you're like, when you're overwhelmed, your mind blocks stuff out. It has to. And that's part of like the focus. But at the same time, it's like, oh, that's important. That's important. So it also loses discernment. So every single thing on your to-do list, every single thing that people are asking you to do, or information that you see coming at you on social media, oh, I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this. Maybe they are good things to do, but they're not the thing that's going to help you the most right now. So what this does is it brings you to a state where you can actually see, oh, there's maybe only 1 or 2 or 3 things that need to be done right now, and that's going to give me huge leverage forward. And then those things are going to create space for me so that I can do the other things if they're even necessary. And it also develops the discernment. Are these things necessary to achieve what I want to achieve. Just because they're good things to do doesn't mean they're the right things to do for you and for your business at this time. Maybe they're better at another time. So, it gives you the ability for the clarity to be able to do that.

That makes perfect sense. You know, you've got me sold, but I'd like to get into some myth-busting about meditation and some pitfalls and cautionaries that we should be aware of. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back. I hope you are getting a I hope you're learning a lot from today's episode. I know I am. It's opened up some awarenesses for me that I think I could leverage. As you can tell though, Kira and I are on a mission to support leaders just like you. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you or someone you know might be planning a leadership retreat or a conference, drop us a line. I'd love to explore how we could be of service to you and your people. Don't be afraid. The contact info is in the show notes. Kira, when I talk to people about meditation or about this idea of being intentional in looking within ourselves first, can we jump into some myth-busting? What are some of the things that you hear when we talk about meditation? Like, I know that some people I talk to have a picture in their heads of sitting on a pillow with one's legs tied up like a pretzel, moaning, oom, oom. What are the myths out there and what's the reality?

Well, first of all, there's like more than 70 different kinds of meditation. So different ones do different things. So to say that they all do the same thing and there's only one type of meditation, it's kind of like saying that all exercise is baseball.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

There's multiple sports and there's multiple different things. And the same is true with meditation. So that's one misconception. I think the other one is, is that you are going to have a quiet mind. And that can be an outcome, but there are tremendous benefits of going on the path towards that. And you don't have to have a quiet mind in order to have a lot of the benefits. In fact, some of the meditations that I teach, that's not even an objective. We do want to be in a calmer state, absolutely. But some of the things are like awareness. I want to see myself more clearly. And there can be other objectives with meditation. If you're kind of leery about it because you think, oh, I can never have a quiet mind, or I don't want to spend, you know, what I did was 2.5 hours a day, you don't have to. You can gain tremendously. I mean, like starting with 7 minutes per day and you can even, if you want those, you know, those internal perceptions, it can be a 30-minute-per-day practice, which you've created the space for because now you're solving problems that you weren't solving previously and doing it in an easier, faster, more efficient way.

I love that. There's a question here. So is there any sort of mantra or handle you grab onto to get into the proper frame of mind? Hmm.

Well, really, I mean, there's so many different mantras out there, so I usually don't teach them, to be honest, but I do know a lot about it. So one that you would use, it depends on your level of ability. So I would say that if you have one that connects to your spirituality, definitely use something like that. But I would say it needs to be whatever you're putting into your mind, you are repeating that in effect is a mantra, whether or not we want it to be repeated. So if you're thinking something over and over again, like, oh, this is too hard, this is hard, that's a mantra. So you want to change that. So you want it to be something that you desire as an outcome. I personally think one-word mantras are at most 3-word mantras are better. I also prefer ones that aren't in English because we have less resistance to it, but it's up to you. If you need peace, say peace. If you, you know, whatever it is, it's the emotional side of it that you're connecting with as well that you need to be aware of. So if you're saying a mantra over and over again and you are not connecting to it, or you're feeling a lot of emotional resistance to it, You probably need to back off on that mantra because you're actually just adding to the resistance rather than creating that outcome of whatever the intention is or the word is that that mantra is. Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. Like if somebody wants success and they're sitting down and thinking success, success, success, but everything that they're doing is not creating that clarity of what that might look like, I can absolutely see that they're All of a sudden becomes an argument in your brain on how you're going to achieve that.

Yes, I'm gonna add to that clarity a bit. So if you're saying success, success, success, and you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling like I'm a failure, if you're feeling I'm disappointed in myself, or you're feeling like this is hard, or you're feeling like I don't know how I'm gonna do it, that mantra is not helping you.

Right, gotcha.

So you want to find one that is going to be believable, that you're going to be in a relaxed state and find as little resistance as possible. But it is still on the path to what you would like to have as an outcome. So usually backing off and making it kind of more general until you can feel it so that you at least don't feel resistance and maybe you feel a positivity and an excitement towards it, then that will be serving you probably a lot better.

I love that. Are there any pitfalls or cautionaries we should be aware of when jumping into this idea of meditating? Because you mentioned already, this idea of not buying into it and causing even more overwhelm. So what other cautionaries should we be aware of for those people who think that this might be something they want to explore?

Okay. So first of all, there are a lot of different kinds of meditation and there are a lot of different teachers. So definitely if you are beginner, intermediate level, or even if you're not, working with a teacher is really important. There's a couple of reasons for this. They're kind of like you're working with your mind. So it is kind of a safety thing. And you want to work with a really experienced teacher because I've worked with people that are, you know, even advanced meditators. And I was going to teach them a beginning level practice. And I, because I could see that they were missing some skills. That's another really important reason why you want to work with a teacher that's experienced. But I also received intuitively that this wasn't the right practice for that person.

Okay.

That it wasn't going to have the right outcome for them. So you want to work with a teacher that has the ability and that actually does do that to make sure as best they can that the practices are going to be appropriate. I would say if people are taking a lot of pharmaceutical or not pharmaceutical, well, certain pharmaceuticals, you may want to be careful to make sure that it's not going to strengthen or weaken what you're doing.

Okay.

With those aspects. Although I've seen a number of people, especially diabetics, get off of their drugs through doing meditation and other practices. And you also, if you have any other, like if you're working with a mental health professional in any other aspects, you wanna just make sure that they clear it and they say it's appropriate. So I would say those would be the main concerns. And are there some people that are better off not meditating? Yes. If someone's got narcissistic tendencies, if they're a controlling and manipulative person, You need to be very careful about the types of practices. They're not to say that there aren't practices, there are, but we don't want to make those people, give them a stronger mind, right? So I would say that's probably not the right thing for you at this time. I would give them other practices other than meditation.

Love that. This has been really fantastic, Kira. Um, could you just remind everybody one more time how they can get hold of you?

Yes. You can find me on LinkedIn under Kira Leskew.

And as well, I believe in the show notes, I have a link to an assessment that people can take. So if people want to go to the show notes, they could just click on that link and takes them to your website.

Yeah, I think probably the best one if people have questions is to connect with me on LinkedIn, but absolutely. So in the little link that I have, I talk about morals required, which we didn't really touch on, to do meditation because with a strong mind, there is a responsibility to, you know, not overstep boundaries with other people and use it to find the solutions where we're respectful of other people. So yeah, but if people want to know about the practices specifically, LinkedIn's the best way.

Thank you very much. As we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts? Anything that we didn't tickle today?

Yes, don't tolerate stress and overwhelm.

Underlying message.

Yeah, it's not helping you. It's not helping you. You make things so much easier for yourself if you get yourself into a healthy state. That's the first thing. With regard to stress, with regard to stress.

Thank you so much for doing this with us today. I really appreciate you being here and sharing your knowledge and your obvious passion and your expertise. My goodness, it was just like a waterfall. Thank you so much for doing this with us today.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Marc. I really appreciate it.

Nice having you. Do you have any questions about today's If you enjoyed this episode, or maybe you're thinking, hey, we could really use a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with Marc. Well, good news. You can snag a spot on my online calendar. You just have to hit the link in the show notes. The one is marked meetwith.marchaine.com and you'd be all set. And as always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, why don't you subscribe to this podcast? Follow me on social media. Interact. I'd love to hear your comments. Was this of value to you? Did you get anything? Any big aha moments? Look, it's been really great having you along for the ride. So, thank you for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.

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