M is for Mindfulness

Hi everyone and welcome to this episode. I'm so excited. We are on the third principle of the Lamplighter Leadership Principles, um, and, and this is probably one of my favorites. It actually has a great backstory. Um, this is the third. The first session we did was on love, that is the first L of Lamplighters, uh, and then A, which is ambition, and today we are on M, which is mindfulness. So I'm excited to share with you, uh, but I also wanna encourage you, if you haven't done so already, go back and listen to the previous sessions, cuz these all go together. Um, especially the first 4 of Lamplighters, right? Love, ambition, mindfulness, purpose. They go together. Um, and, uh, of course I'm excited about all of the principles, uh, but those 4 are really critical, uh, as we begin. Um, but today the concept of mindfulness, the reason this is interesting to me is because, uh, back in the day, uh, you know, 10, 11 years ago, I was on the Amazon Alexa team. And when I was on the Amazon Alexa team, I wanted to build, you know, mindfulness and prayer applications, and I wasn't really supported to do that, right? Like, they were kind of like, nobody needs mindfulness, who— that's a dumb idea. Um, I even remember in the early days when it wasn't working, everyone was like, see, I told you this is a bad— like, people were just constantly looking for reasons for why it should fail. Um, But I was persistent, resilient. Some of our other, my Lamplighter principles, I really, really, as a mom, as a caregiver, as a special needs mom, I really was like, mindfulness is key. And if I can just get a moment of mindfulness, a moment of peace without having to pick up my phone, without getting distracted by email or a meeting I need to attend, just to ask Alexa for 1 minute of mindfulness, this would be a beautiful thing for me. And so that's exactly what I did and how that concept was born kind of in, in my desire to combine mindfulness as part of what I consider to be the 12 most important principles and virtues of a leader, especially an AI leader today, right? I think every leader is going to be either leveraging or certainly be experiencing the impact of AI in their organization, in their teams, and the more you can harness these principles, these, the Lamplighter effect, um, the more you can embody the Lamplighter principles, the easier it will be for you to generate really positive results with artificial intelligence. But I do think it starts with, with these principles. And so the first, uh, as I mentioned today, we're gonna talk about mindfulness. And I, I, I think, you know, if I look back, Mindfulness for me, um, was always kind of intertwined with meditation, though I do recognize that they are completely separate things, but they were often intertwined with meditation. So at a very young age, I think my dad introduced me to sitting still and listening to that still small voice within myself when I was like 6, 7 years old. He, um, raised me in a, uh, a Christian faith called Unity that really believed in kind of, well, unity, connection, world elevation, consciousness elevation. Like how do we just become the best version of ourselves? And the first, I guess, lesson in that was when you sit still and you're quiet, there is a part of you that already knows what the best version of yourself is. There's a part of you that knows the perfect and best and right outcome for your life. Sometimes we just need to ask. Sometimes we need to be quiet enough. We need to quiet the outside world. Long enough to just hear these whispers. And sometimes they come in dreams. Sometimes they come in literally just ideas that pop into your head. But this is really how Lamplighters was born. I woke up one morning and I was, I started writing down all these principles. It actually started as the 7 Virtues of Mindful Leadership, but it blossomed. And before I knew it, and I've said this in other podcast episodes, before I knew it, I had 12 principles. And at the same time, I ended up reading a book, uh, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and realized that having 12 principles is a really powerful way to live your life because you can spend one week on each principle and you can go through it on a quarterly basis, constantly evolving who you are over time. And I would just fall in love with that idea. So mindfulness became, became the beginning, but it really did turn into how do I create How do I create these moments of stillness? How do I create these moments of mindfulness throughout my day, um, throughout my life? And one thing I began doing was implementing something that I call, you know, it's my morning routine, if you will, right? What I try to do every single morning when I wake up. Now I will tell you, you know, transparently, candidly, like I don't do this every single morning. I want to, I set the intention, but I think along with mindfulness, one of the most powerful, um, perspective you can have toward yourself is grace, right? And I think the word I often use in the morning is recommit. That no matter what I failed to do yesterday, no matter what I failed to do this morning, if I'm waking up at 8 o'clock and I meant to wake up at 4:30, I give myself grace in that moment. But then I recommit to what I wanted. I recommit that day as if I'd never failed, as if I never woke up late. I don't sit there and mope around like, oh, I lost 3 days, 3 hours of my day, it's terrible. Oh no. I recommit right then and say, okay, what am I gonna do from now on? From this moment forward. I'm not going to say I'm going to start tomorrow. I'll start this afternoon. In the moment that I make the realization that I missed the mark of where I wanted to be, that's the moment that I change. That's the moment that I recommit to the outcomes that I want. And so that ties a little bit into our ambition session that we did before this. But, but let's go into my morning routine so you can have a sense, and everyone should have their own. I'd encourage you to play around with it a little bit, but when I wake up, typically the first thing I like to do is be grateful. And there are lots of ways to do this. I was given as a speaker gift— well, I wonder if I have it around here. I'm like, yes, I do. I was given a speaker gift called the 5 Minute Journal, and here it is right here. This is actually not the one I got as a gift because I've used that one already. Um, but, uh, but this 5 Minute Journal, when you wake up every single morning— this one's purple. This is actually from We'll talk about them in a little bit. Another part of my routine. Um, this is from Othership, uh, which is a really cool place in New York and in Toronto and hopefully in Miami soon. Um, but this journal is part of my morning routine, but the activity is really gratefulness. So every single morning it will ask, I'll just go to a blank page. The first question asks every single morning is, What are you grateful for? I am grateful for— now what I often will do here is try not to get stuck in a like rote memorization. I'm grateful for my family, grateful for my house, grateful for my, you know, my business, grateful for my clients, grateful for blah blah blah. Like it just rolls off the tongue. What I try to think about is a feeling of gratitude that I have about something that happened maybe recently or something that came to fruition recently. So I try to be very specific. If I'm grateful for husband, why am I grateful today? Not, you know, in general, I'm glad he signed that contract. I'm glad he's contractually obligated today to deal with me. Um, but how do I instead look at this from the frame of what happened in the last day or two that really allows me to feel this sense of gratitude? Because that is the key with gratitude. It's not just, can you list off a bunch of things that you're, you're grateful for or think you should be grateful for? It's how do you generate, generate that genuine sense of life is not terrible. Like, that's pretty good. I, I'm happy that happened. Um, as a matter of fact, what we do in our house at the end of our day, we have, uh, you know, as many of you know, I have a bunch of kids. And so we sit around the dinner table and everyone says what they're grateful for. Um, and we've actually recently shifted that a little bit to include an option. It's actually not optional. It's like both and. Or just this last new thing. So everyone who says they're grateful for us, they have an opportunity to say what they're grateful for. And then they are also invited to share the number one most positive memory of the day. Like, what is that one memory? And when you— when we started doing this, what I noticed was a shift from grateful for us, which everyone was in this, like, I'm grateful for the dog, I'm grateful for the cat, I'm grateful for the goldfish. I'm grateful for going outside. Like, it was just not very exciting. They were kind of just like trying to get through it. And we— it used to be exciting at the beginning, but it's kind of become a routine, a habit. And so we changed it to say, okay, now think about the happiest moment today. And every single time we do it, when they, when they uncover the moment that was happiest, they smile and they embody that feeling. Of like, that was a good minute. And that's how we end our day together. Everyone thinking about what was the happiest. And it's so cool because as the kids go around, they're all like, oh yeah, yeah, me too, me too. But I'm gonna do a different one. But yeah, me too. I, I, I like that moment also. And it's just such a beautiful, beautiful moment. So waking up and taking a moment to think about how good things are, you know, that you are breathing. I often will do a great gratitude meditation where I simply just lay in bed and I will, before I grab my phone, right, before I do anything with technology or start answering email, I just lay in bed, put my hands over my heart, and I just take a deep breath. And I'm like, well, I'm glad I'm breathing right now. I am grateful for that. I'm grateful that my heart is beating. I'm grateful that my body is working. I'm grateful that I have an opportunity to get up. And, and I let my gratitude expand from my body outward. I'm grateful for my husband who's sleeping here with me and supporting me. I'm grateful for the bed that we're sleeping in, the house that we're in. Great for all my kids that are in this house and happy and enjoying summer. I'm grateful, you know, like it just, it becomes this increasing sphere of influence around things that have made my life so valuable. And none of that is, I'm grateful for money, I'm grateful for, you know, a fancy house, a fancy car, like those just aren't the things that I personally am grateful for. I'm sure it doesn't really matter. It's— but it's the feeling that I get, right, when I say that. And I start my day with this, and I start my day with this, like, just high, high level of energy and optimism based on that gratitude. The second question that I like about this book— and again, it's The Five Minute Journal. You can probably see it, um, on you if you're watching this on Amazon Live. You'll see it in the carousel. But The Five Minute Journal, uh, and so the second question is What would make today great? And this is kind of this forward pacing. I've talked about this before, this concept of a reticular activation system, right? That when you put on paper what will make today great and you write it down with your hands, the more senses you get involved, right? The better. So you're tactically writing it down, your eyes are reading it, maybe you read it out loud, right? You, you've embodied this, like what would make today great? Maybe it's getting that email sequence put together and out to your customers. Maybe it's delivering, uh, maybe it's doing a video or recording a podcast, or maybe it's spending more time with your kids. Whatever that is, you write it down. You now have set your mind in action to bring that experience closer to you. It's gonna start, you know, reticular activation is, um, associated. Most of us know this, like when we buy a new car, or a new dress, right? And when we buy that car, I remember this happening to me a long time ago. I bought a new Nissan Murano when it was first year it came out and it was this like Sahara sand color. I'd never seen one before. I was like, this is the only one. Like I, it's unique. And y'all know what happened, right? I walk off, you know, I take that car off the lot and I start seeing Sahara Muranos everywhere, everywhere because my mind is like, Hey, this thing exists. I'm gonna show it to you now. It's not that they, everyone just went out and bought one yesterday. They had always been there. My mind just didn't care about it. So this is why it's so important to write what you want at the beginning of your day. What are your goals? What are your targets? So that your subconscious, right? You, your mind can say, hey, let me show that to you now. Let me open your awareness to how available that outcome is for you, right? Now. And so use that to your advantage. And then the last question it asks, or the last portion of the morning routine, is a daily affirmation. Now, I don't have affirmations like most people, I suppose. It's not like, I am pretty, or I am, you know, gosh darn, people like me. But I, my affirmations are simply stating future results that I am 100% confident that I will achieve that just haven't shown up in my life yet. So for over a decade, I wrote in my daily affirmation section, I would write, I'm gonna become a bestselling author. Over a decade. And for 8 years of that decade, I never wrote a thing. I never wrote, cuz I didn't really like writing. And then finally I wrote, and finally I hit the bestseller list and I took a picture of it and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm in new, you know, new and noteworthy at Barnes Noble. Like these are all dreams that came through came true, but for years I wrote it as if it was true. I will be a bestselling author. I will be a— I will be the highest paid keynote speaker in my field. I will be highly regarded in my field. I, I, and I don't write it— this is actually a huge clarification— I don't write it in future tense. I write it as if it's true right now. So let me go back. Oh, this is my more recent one, but it will be Oh, let me see if I have one here. I'll see if I can find one that I could share with you. Yeah, so this day I actually was about to become— I was about to take the stage at a big event and I wrote, I'm confident and clear in sharing my passion and expertise with the world. So that was me affirming like this. I'm going to be clear, confident. I'm going to be able to share my perp— my perspective, my ideas with the world. They will, you know, receive that with joy and excitement. But I wrote it in the present tense, right? Like I had not done that speech yet. I have, you know, my other ones are, I wanna, like I mentioned before, I wanna be, I don't wanna say I want to be, I don't wanna put it in future sense. I am a bestselling author. I'm not, it hasn't shown up in the world yet, but I'm writing it as if it was true so the world can help me make that possible. I am a good wife. I'm a good parent. I'm a good sister. I'm a good daughter. Some days I am, some days I'm not. But when I write that down, I write as if it's true so that I can attract those experiences into my life. And that is a big part of my mindfulness journey is that I'm setting my mind to be intentional about specific things. And I do that every morning and then every night. So it takes me about, I don't know, a few minutes, 5, 5 minutes at the most to do that exercise, um, in the morning. And then at the end of the day, this sits right on my bedside table unless I bring it down, cuz I'm gonna do a podcast. Um, at, on my bedside table. So I've already done my session for today. At the end of the day tonight, I will write my highlights of the day. And that's kind of reverse gratitude, right? Like, here's all the cool things that happened today. Um, and what did I learn today? And the benefit of the last thing I do before I go to bed is what did I learn today is I set my subconscious thinking about how can I learn more from my experiences? How can I raise specific concerns, challenges, maybe open questions that I have? How do I think about those right before I go to bed? Um, and that has helped me many times. I dream about what I want to do. I mean, sometimes I'll wake up with an idea. The leadership, um, acronym came to me when I woke up. I also created another program called Lovefluencers. The whole thing came to me when I woke up on a Sunday morning because I set this intention right before I go to bed. What have I learned? How is, you know, like, how, how can I get the most use of my brain power even if I'm sleeping? All right. So, so that part, that my, that morning routine, right? That is my morning where I say I either do, I actually do both, right? Either I wake up and I do a gratitude meditation. I grab my book, I write. You know, down my grateful fors and my planning. The next thing that I often will do, of course, uh, maybe you'd expect, uh, is I try to move. I try to move my body. I'm right now suffering a little bit, uh, from years and years and years of carrying a backpack on one shoulder. So one, uh, one of my shoulders is in a lot of pain, and so I have some rehab I have to do anyway. Um, but I am always thinking, how do I move my body? Do I get on a treadmill? I have a desk treadmill up stairs? Can I— do I go downstairs and get on my Peloton? Do I— like, how do I move my body and get energy flowing? And sometimes it's as easy as just doing a few sun salutations or yoga postures to just awaken my body the way I've awakened my mind with that practice. And the more I do this, the better I typically feel. It like helps increase my energy. A lot of people always ask me like, how are you so energetic? And this is one of the things that I do. Now, once— so I get up, I do my meditation, I write in my journal, I move my body. The next thing I do is I get a little bit more serious on the planning side. So I have a daily planner. This is one of them, but I want to share it with you because what I like about the daily plan is it allows me to write out all like what I want to do. So my priorities, my goals, my targets. The metrics I'm going to use to measure my success. And probably the most important thing is I manually write out how I'm going to spend every hour of that day. And this is important because, um, I always say like, you have to be in control of your time, right? It's not time management, it's time control. Because if you are not intentional about your time, what's going to happen is people— if you do not have it locked in that you're going to think for 30 minutes or plan or create or build a demo or record a podcast, if you do not line that up with the slots of time available in your day, including thinking, uh, resting, walking in nature, all of these things. But if you don't have it in your calendar, it's easy for— I, I remember I, I learned from one of my mentors. He said the devil sits in the spare or the blank spaces of your calendar. And I understand what he means because when I don't have time allotted, that time gets stolen by things that do not drive value for for me that do not get me closer to my goals. I'll end up, you know, spooling on social media or getting on a conversation with somebody that is not directly tied to the things that I want. And as much as I love talking to people, if it's not tied to my goals and I'm not really helping them, it's just kind of shooting the breeze, that is not the best use of my time, right? Like, I want to make sure that I prioritize my time so that I can get the best outcome for myself, for my family, for my business. And so while I will say I do like a little bit of flexibility, I do always like a chance to talk to a good friend if I happen to catch them or if they happen to catch me. But I am very intentional about how I spend my time. I control every block of time as much as possible to ensure that those blocks are being used to go after my goals and my dreams. And if I don't do that, what'll end up happening is that I look at my calendar and over time I will look at my calendar and it will show me how I've spent my time. As a matter of fact, I just did a video on how to use ChatGPT's new agent mode to do a calendar audit, and it'll tell you how you spent your time. And if you— this is what I'm going to do from now on, right? Like if you document your calendar in your digital Google Calendar, everything you did every single hour of the day. And then 6 months from now you ask Google, how did I do? These are my goals. How did I spend my time in accordance with these goals? It'll give you a very real understanding of like, do you really wanna do that thing? Because you spent zero time writing and you say you wanna be an author, or you spent zero time speaking and you say you wanna be a speaker. I think this is truth, right? It's the reality of what do we want and what are we willing to give to get that thing? What are we willing to do, right? What is the exchange? Everything is an exchange of energy, of intention. And if you set a goal and you don't meet that goal, like, you really have to kind of look at how did you spend your time and your energy in order to get that goal. And oftentimes we look back and we're like, oh man, I didn't do enough. And that is what this type of intention sets up. Okay, so I have a couple other things I want to talk to you about, um, with mindfulness. I want to give you a couple tools that you can use Uh, to become more mindful. One of them is, uh, what's called the Tic Tac or M&M meditation. And I used to do this as a kid where you take— I think I have some in here— a Tic Tac, or I actually have Ice Breakers. These are longer, so this is for advanced meditators. I think I have some Tic Tacs in here, but you take one, uh, a mint, um, or an M&M. M&M's are nice cuz there's chocolate involved, but you take a mint, you put it in your mouth, You close your eyes and you focus solely on dissolving the mint or candy. Don't chew it, right? Don't crunch it. Just let it dissolve naturally. And your mindfulness is not meditating and trying to connect with that inner part of yourself. It's just setting your mindful intention on a single thing, focusing your attention. And in this case, I'm gonna give you a mint to focus your attention on. And when you focus your attention on that mint the entire time, you'll notice what happens. And it's what self-awareness is all about. You'll notice your mind will get drawn to, what am I doing tomorrow? What's in my inbox? Am I missing a meeting? Like you're, and, and it's like a, a puppy, right? Like when you're teaching a puppy how to, you know, use the, the bathroom, like you'll just have to keep bringing it back to the newspaper. Like take your mind and bring it back to, the mint and ha— and, and focusing on that single thing. Like as your mind wanders away, you pick it up and you bring it back and your mind wanders again and you pick it up and put it back. The art of mindfulness is actually in your ability to train your mind to refocus. And the more refocusing you can do consistently, the better you get at it. And now when you're trying to focus on something for work, Right? Even if you get distracted, you've used that muscle, right? You've trained your mind to refocus and it becomes extremely powerful tool, um, to have in your toolbox. Now, if this was actually, uh, when I thought about this, this was before COVID but before COVID I used to drive to work an hour, sometimes more every day, both ways, right? One hour in, one hour back, depending on traffic. And I uncovered something called the Um, the brake light meditation. And so basically what I would do is I would look at the brake lights in front of me and I would just focus on those brake lights. I would focus on the design. I would focus, you know, and, and as my mind wandered, I would just focus on the brake lights. The nice thing about this is that it's not like dangerous for you to do while driving, but it allows you to practice the art of focus, the art of mindfulness, of intention, of, of bringing your mind back to focus on a single thing. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my own skill on Alexa. So you can go to Alexa and open mindfulness and it'll take you through a 1-minute meditation, 1 minute. And it's actually 1 minute of mindfulness. So it's just a brook, a bubbling brook, or I should call it now, but it's not plugged in right now. Because every time I say Alexa in my podcast, it starts talking to me and I'm like, no, not right now, Alexa. Um, but if you ask Alexa for mindfulness, then it will give you 90 seconds of just peaceful sounds. And that's enough for you to just take a moment and draw yourself to those sounds. Draw yourself away from whatever's happening, a meeting that's coming up, the nonsense that's going on in your house, right? Like whatever you're dealing with and just take a breath, close your eyes. And focus. So I encourage you to do that. Now, the last two things I'm going to encourage you to do, um, are— is number one, there's a book that I really like. Uh, we— I did a course, um, for women in AI leadership. I've taught it a couple times. I'll teach it again this year. And for women in AI leadership, I— it's very important to have a very strong approach to work, at least from my perspective, that oftentimes when I'm on the job and in corporate America, I find that there's lots of opportunities for me to exercise patience and empathy. So what I— what I really liked about this book was that it helped me practice the art of nonviolent communication. And there's a whole book on it. It's called Nonviolent Communication. There's a workbook as well. I don't think I have it in my bookshelf right here, but that is something I would also encourage you to read. Right. So Nonviolent Communication, it's a great book. It will teach you how to share your feelings, your concerns, without necessarily putting it in a way that triggers the other person to get defensive or to feel like you're attacking them. It is an art of communication that puts all of the responsibility and accountability on you. Like, here's how I feel. These— this is what's going on in my life, in my lived experience, and I'm sharing that with you in order for you to have empathy for, for my perspective. And when you talk like that with people, they're much less likely to get angry or upset with you or blame you, right? They're like, oh, I, I could see why you think that. Um, that definitely wasn't my intention. That's almost always the result of my conversations with people when talk to them and just explain why I'm feeling a certain way, they're like, oh, I didn't, I didn't mean to make that. I didn't mean for that emotion, right, to come up. I was just trying to share with you my, my thoughts and my ideas. But it helps you bring emotional awareness into the workplace in a safe and responsible way. So, so the book that I'm referring to is called The 7-Day Mental Diet. It's written by an author named Emmett Fox. He's one of my favorite people. I think I have— I definitely have his book here. I don't know if I can find it in time, but— oh yeah, there it is. Emmett Fox. This is a different book, but it's awesome. You can see I definitely have read it a few times. But Emmett Fox, great author. He wrote this— oh my gosh, such an old book. I love it. Oh my goodness, I love it when I find books and they have all these cool things. Some things never change. This is a, uh, uh, US Airways. Is that even an airline anymore? Anyway, that's pretty cool. Um, but I, I share this, uh, this guide with you, the 7-Day Mental Diet, because it's going to teach you in 7 days, it's going to teach you how to control your, your thoughts, your reactions. Um, so I'm going to put it in the show notes. I'm going to encourage you to take a look at it and listen to it. I think you'll really enjoy it. Um, and then for those of you who are like, you feel like you got 7 days down, I want to also invite you to, to, to participate in a meditation that I've done many times. And this is the 21-Day Abundance Meditation. It's actually led by Deepak Chopra. It is on Spotify. Um, I went from day 1 all the way to day, uh, 21. It has activities every day. And my abundance has exponentially grown every time I've done this, this work. It's a lot of work, I will tell you, but it, if you're looking for a way to kind of break out of a certain state that you're in, um, this is an amazing, incredible meditation to do. So you'll see that in the show notes as well. Um, but mindfulness, you know, as a key to leadership, I think it's really important that we have the ability to recognize what we're grateful for, be it And that would include in business, right? Our teams and the products and our customers and our vendors, like being, coming to our, the workplace from a, with an attitude of gratitude, but also using our, you know, using some discipline to actually control how we use our time, where we spend our energy, and how our mind is being used on a daily basis. It's our responsibility to control how we use our time, to ensure that we're using our time to drive the results that we want. And as a leader of yourself, of your family, of your company, of your line of business, this is critical, is really gaining this discipline. And so a lot of these activities I mentioned to you, building a morning routine, um, practicing mindfulness, the Tic Tac meditation, the car break meditation, right? Doing the 7-Day Mental Diet, doing the 21-Day Abundance, All of those things will help practice, will help work the— create the muscle memory of mental discipline. And that, I think, is a really big part of my success. Uh, and I hope it will also become part of your success. Thanks for listening. Uh, I hope you enjoyed today's session. I'm really excited, uh, for the next one, which is all about purpose. And, uh, I'll see you then. So thanks for listening. Bye.