Discover the Secret to Becoming a Powerful Speaker with Mindfulness

What's the connection between mindfulness and strong communication skills? We're going to find out right now. Our special guest today is Stan Cerillis. He is the instructor and producer of an award winning program, the Complete Mindfulness and Meditation Training Course found on Udemy. He's a world renowned meditation mindfulness expert. Meditation and mindfulness do go together a lot. He has trained everyone from the European Parliament to Merck to Accenture. He is an in demand expert around the world. We're very happy that he's joining us today. Stan, how are you today?

I'm good, tj. Thank you for having me.

Now, I'm interested in exploring the connection between mindfulness and communication. But let's just start from the very beginning and confession. I've read a lot of books on mindfulness. I've even conducted a course on mindfulness, but even I'm not sure exactly how to explain it to someone who's kind of heard this around and thinks maybe it's a buzzword. Let's just start at the beginning. How do you define mindfulness?

Yeah, I think that's a very good question, T.J. and it's sometimes, strangely enough, not that easy to make it as simple as possible. But I think if there would be a one word definition for mindfulness, it would be awareness. So awareness is something that we get when we pay attention to something. So in that sense, mindfulness training or the practice of mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to certain things so that we become more aware of them. And what we generally tend to do with mindfulness is pay more attention to our inner world. In other words, paying attention to the thoughts that are going through our mind, the emotions that we are experiencing, but also the various sensations that we feel in the body. So those three elements are you could say the building blocks of, of any experience that we ever have in this moment. Thoughts, emotions and sensations in the body. So with mindfulness, we are becoming more aware of this. I thought maybe you disappeared.

That's a great. But let's use this as a learning moment. That's a great thing to think about when it comes to mindfulness because I'm really, I'm trying to pay close attention to you and I think I have, but I am in essence being less than completely mindful because I'm also orchestrating the, the camera move. So I had pushed a button. We're using a streamyard software and I wanted to put you full screen.

Yes.

So I, I removed myself from stage.

Yeah, that's very interesting. Actually, it's a very different experience as well, when the camera is just on me and I don't hear you anymore.

Yes. So. And now I brought myself back. So.

Yes.

And I may have actually forgotten that when I do that, you can't hear my audio. So I may have said something and forgotten that. But this does. This is a perfect segue to. To. The question for you is, when people are doing public speaking and presenting, how can they be mindful not only of their own feelings and sensations, but of their audience? Because I see all the time people are so fixated on their script or their PowerPoint or their bullet points. Meanwhile, someone is in the audience with a confused look on their face, their hand up, and the speaker is completely oblivious. They're not really in the moment of this shared experience with the audience. How do you help people with that?

Yeah, I think in a way, communication is the master test for your mindfulness practice. Because it's a very complicated thing that we're doing. Right. We're bringing our message across, but we're also not only trying to focus on ourselves, but also on the audience. And often there is an interaction with that audience and we're processing information and so on. So, I mean, there's a lot of elements that we could unpack from there. I think the first thing that's important when you're speaking to an audience is with mindfulness, this ability to check in with yourself, how am I doing? So, for example, when you pulled out just now and I was alone and I thought something had gone wrong, I noticed a lot of thoughts coming up. Should I continue? Should I stop? Should I wait? Right. But I could check.

And that was my fault. I should have. I should have warned you at the beginning that I would be doing different things with the screen recording.

Yeah, but that's fine. That's. Yeah, absolutely. But it's a good example of something happens. So how do I deal with this mindfulness? Okay. I'm trying to figure it out. And I decided to continue, but I could notice the emotions that were. That were. It was producing and things like that. But that was fine. I made a decision based on what was going on. And the point that you're making about your audience is very important as well, because of course, if we focus all our attention on ourselves, how am I doing? What should I be saying now? Then we can forget our audience. So with mindfulness, we're trying to direct our attention to all the elements that require attention, which is your message, how you're doing inside, and whether you are feeling okay. But then also your audience, what's going on with them? Can you get certain feedback from just the way that they're looking? Can you notice when they want to ask questions? So I think mindfulness can be quite helpful in managing this complex game of attention in such a situation.

So in my world of training, European members of Parliament, for example, cross section with what you do. I really stress to people, that's why you do not want to be reading a script or a teleprompter, with very few exceptions. And one of my clients won a Nobel Peace Prize, and everyone's going to be studying that speech for years. So he really does have to sort of go off text. If you are a prime minister, a president of a country, and every single thing you say could cause a scandal, you kind of got to follow the speech, the text, the teleprompter. But for the 99.9% of business executives, no one's scrutinizing them to that level. And I always believe it's far better off to really be focused on your. Be mindful of your audience, their reactions. Are they looking at you with an eyebrow up? Are they nodding their head? Worst case scenario, are they ignoring you and staring at their cell phone because you're so darn boring? So you've got to really be mindful of that audience. I think in most cases. How do you get people to do that? Because there's a slight contradiction between focusing on them versus how am I feeling? How's my breath? What am I experiencing now?

I think you make a good point. And one of the things that can get really lost when you're reading off a teleprompter or something like that, or everything's completely rehearsed is authenticity. It can become a message that doesn't come across because you're not really telling it. You're not really sharing a story. You're just reading words of a teleprompter. So that's on top of the fact that you might be connecting less with your audience. I think many people will cling to teleprompters or learning everything by heart because they're stressed, right? They want to feel in control in the situation that they're in, which is somewhere where they need to perform. They do not want to have a blackout and not know what to say. So they will hold on for control with these kind of tools. So the message with mindfulness and in combination with what you just said is see if you can let go of this desire to control everything to the T and Trust that when you need to say certain things, you will know what to say. And, of course, you prepare. Preparing is important. You need to have the talking heads, the talking points. But you want to find that balance between rehearsing or practicing and then still being spontaneous in the moment. And then, really, let's tease this out.

A little bit, because I do have a slightly different perspective. I'm actually all in favor of control. The irony is, of course, I think the second you use a teleprompter or you try to memorize a speech, you've actually lost control. Because what happens to most people is their speed becomes consistent, their volume becomes consistent, their tone becomes consistent, and they've completely lost control of the experience for the audience, because now everyone is bored out of their mind. So it's. I happen to think the desire for control is great. The things people are doing to try to create control are not helping them reach their goals. What you really do want, I think, is to control the experience for your audience in such a way that you know before you even start that they're going to perceive you as comfortable, confident, relaxed, that they are going to understand your key messages, remember your messages, and act upon them. Now, in order to do that, you may have to go in different ways. You may have to answer a question in the middle of the presentation. You may have to look at someone's confused look and then give another example. So how you're actually speaking and what you're saying in the presentation may have to change on a dime in the middle of it. If the goal is actual control on the experience for the audience. Kind of.

My perspective, I completely follow that perspective. I think preparation is very important and exactly. I like how you said you want to control the experience for your audience. And in a way, that also means that you need to let go a little bit of the control, of having everything in a very rigid structure, if that helps you connect with your audience. And I think, really with mindfulness, we're usually working on letting go a little bit of that obsessive control to have to make sure nothing can go wrong. Right. We need to be able to flow a little bit in the communication that we're doing.

Definitely in the flow. A key concept. And in my mind, that's what does connect to mindfulness, is you have to be in the flow. You have to be in the moment. Because it's really easy for audience members to notice someone who's essentially reading a teleprompter off their brain if they're thinking about, here's what I'm going to say in the next sentence. And here's what I'm going to say five seconds from now, in order to sound important, you don't feel like the speaker's even present. And it's not that they're reading a script or reading bullet points, but you can just tell they're thinking about what they're going to say. They're not actually having a conversation with us now.

Yeah. And I mean we could also look at maybe more like obviously we have speaking, public speaking, but if we look at like an everyday conversation that you have with anyone, obviously there as well you might not have as much this teleprompter necessity, but.

But also there would be kind of weird to be at breakfast with your kids or your spouse and reading a teleprompter saying, good morning dear, how are you? That would be really weird. You work with parliament. I just have to give a little aside. Ronald Reagan, the former President of the United States was notorious for being in a meeting sometimes with two people reading off of cue cards the whole time. He was so enamored. Now he could do it in a way where he came across fairly well, but he was really beholden to cue cards.

Nice anecdote. I think Joe Biden has a lot of cue cards as well from what I've been told. Yeah. Well, just to give one example of this need or this desire to control, even in one on one conversations, I suffered a lot from anxiety. And this was growing up when I was young, when I was just a child, but also at university. And for me, mindfulness in that regard, really it helped a lot in sort of breaking through this cycle of anxiety, worrying, living inside of my head. And one of the ways that this would manifest is that because I felt it most strongly in social situations, so it was a social anxiety. So I remember going to meet someone that I knew from law school and on the bike right there I was preparing in my head what I was going to say to him, what he could respond and what I would respond next. So I was living in the future, I was worrying about the future. I tried to have full control over something that really needs to flow in the moment. Right. So that's for me where looking back on that, I learned, yeah, anxiety and stress really can make us give up our authenticity or our being in the moment just because we want to feel safe. And I think that's something that is very useful to work on with communicators is how can they get that inner sense of feeling okay, Feeling safe in a situation so that they then can, you know, really bring out their best.

One of the easiest ways to spot an amateur talk show host or interviewer or reporter, is they're either staring at questions the whole time or they've memorized questions. Meanwhile, the person they're interviewing, whether it's a politician or celebrity, has said something incredibly interesting. They've dropped a bomb, and the reporter's not even following up on it because they're. They're just following a prescribed list of questions they thought it had been. They're not in the moment. They asked the question. Now they're thinking about, what's the next question? To be a great interviewer. For that matter, to be a good conversationalist, you could argue even to be a good friend, you have to be in the moment, really listening to the person you're talking to, whether it's one friend or family member at the kitchen table, or you're in a TV studio and 10 million people are there with you watching. You've got to really listen and be in the moment.

Yep, absolutely. And finding that balance between. And this is one of the practices in mindfulness as well, when we apply it to communication is like we call it 50, 50. So placing 50% of your attention with yourself and 50% with the other person, it doesn't really. It's hard to do that at the same time because usually we can only pay attention to one thing at a time. Right. So we usually will switch attention to the other person and then towards ourselves. But it's useful to switch in between one. Of course, we want to listen and be in touch with what the other person is saying. But at the same time, if somebody says something and we get upset, then we really want to have that ability to check with ourselves and say, oh, wow, now I'm getting angry. What do I want to do now? Now that I notice this? So it's always this management of you're listening or interacting with the other person and checking in with yourself.

Great point, Stan. Walk us through your approach. When you're working with members of Parliament, highly paid, busy executives at Merck and Accenture, a lot of them may have a preconception about this. Mindfulness is mumbo jumbo. It's kind of a waste of time. How do you come in, work with them, and help them see immediate improvement in their quality of life, their productivity, their stress levels, whatever it is you're doing to help them?

Very good point that you make. And also about the fact that professionals might not or people Working at big companies and have a lot of responsibility, sometimes they do have some sort of resistance to mindfulness or they have an image of mindfulness as being something that is sort of spiritual or wishy washy, you know, meditating, cross legged. So I think what I've noticed is that one of the most important things to do is to translate mindfulness into a solid rational framework, right. Where you make the minds of those people understand that first of all, there is a framework that makes sense, there is research behind it, and we're using terminology that they can relate to. So instead of saying paying attention to the present moment, I will speak of attention management, right? We're managing our attention and we're choosing to direct it at what's important to us. So what I've noticed is that really helps a lot. But even then, certain practices that might work quite well on a general audience might not work so well with high level professionals. For example, one of the typical starter level or the first practices that we do in a mindfulness training is mindful eating. And it's a very useful practice, but it can be challenging if you have, let's say several board members of a high company, they might see that as funny that you're doing something so trivial that appears trivial to them to mindfully eat, let's say a biscuit or something.

That is interesting to me that you talk about that with Europeans, because every time I go to Europe and I just spent a month there in Paris this summer, I'm always aware of the fact that compared to Americans, it seems like all Europeans are thin, slim, in good shape and eat mindfully because you, if you're in Paris or in Brussels and you see somebody walking down the street slurping ice cream, dad, eating a piece of pizza, pretty much, you know, it's an American, it's not a local. Because the European mentality does seem to really respect food and eating and eating in a mindful way and valuing quality over quantity. And I was reminded as recently as yesterday, I'm at a fancy resort down the street from me on the beach, expensive place for food. And my egg Sandwich is about 10,000 degrees because it's been over microwaved. You can't get a microwaved egg sandwich in Paris unless you're, unless you're at an American chain restaurant. So I'm intrigued by the fact that you need to even talk about that with Europeans. Tell us how that goes.

I don't want to make big statements about the difference between Americans and Europeans in terms of diet, although I do think there are differences. I think, you know, just the fast food culture is even stronger in the United States. But, I mean, a similar thing is happening in Europe. We also have, you know, problems with food. But I think most people, and there's actually research from the University of Harvard that suggests that people spend about half percent, sorry, 50% of their waking hours thinking about something different than what they're actually doing in the moment, and that includes eating. So I think definitely when we're eating, most people will spend at least half the time of that time that they're eating thinking about other things that they still need to do, things that have happened, analyzing certain things in their mind. So it is important to see if we can find this moment again, this experience that we're having through the senses of eating. Because the same research from Harvard also suggests that people report being less happy when they are not paying attention to the activity that they're doing than when they are actually paying attention to that activity. So it's definitely something that's still needed. That's needed in Europe as well.

Stan, let's give people a quick, practical tip on how they can use mindfulness based on what you and I are doing right now. I'm listening to you very carefully right now, but I'm not actually looking at you. I'm not seeing every nuance of your face, because if I were looking at you, I would look like this. I'm now looking at you clearly. But for the sake of people watching us on YouTube and other video platforms, I don't want to do like this. Because to them, it may look like, oh, he's checking his Facebook or he's checking his email. So I'm looking. I'm purposefully looking at the camera. And it's something I've been doing for decades, but for a lot of people, it still feels really weird. So you get this kind of look. What's your advice to people on how to balance the. The thing that helps them focus the most versus the. They are trying to communicate to other people, how to communicate effectively. Because I'm. I'm doing not what's most comfortable to me. I'm. What I'm doing right now is trying to do what's comfortable for the audience by looking at the camera.

That's actually interesting. Just to come back to the point that you're saying, so it means your. Your screen is on a different place than where your camera is. With me, the camera is right above my screen. But, you know, usually in these zoom meetings, I'm Yeah, now I'm looking at you because I'm looking in the camera. Now I'm looking at my screen. But that is a shame, right? That that cannot be one on one the same at the same time. I feel for zoom meetings. That's really comfortable. But if, like you said, if you're trying to really speak to your audience, then actually I could, it would be probably more useful to look in the camera that way. But I mean, if we're looking at tips for balancing your attention with your audience and with yourself, I mean, usually I really start with building up mindfulness foundations of paying attention to your personal experience. I think the 5050 practices is usually quite useful. So shifting, switching between, okay, paying attention to the other person, paying attention to yourself. And usually when it's just about listening, then it's about 100% listening. So now I'm 100% speaking, checking in with myself from time to time. When you're speaking, I'm usually staying with what you're saying almost all the time because once you let your attention drift off to anything else, then you will miss part of the message. So I would see it as a certain. It's useful as a tip, maybe to see it as a percentage and to decide for yourself what is the optimal percentage for me to pay attention to the other person or to pay attention to me, or pay attention to, in your case, the buttons that you're controlling on the podcast and just to make conscious decisions about what's the best approach here.

See, I'll give you a little warning in just a moment. We're going to check out your course on Udemy on mindfulness. I'm going to ask you to give us live your best 30 to 60 second pitch because your course, like all courses, have a preview video, a promo video to sell. But my students, my visitors to the TJ Walker Success Channel, are often trying to focus on how they can pitch their product, their service, their cause more effectively. So we're always interested in hearing people's pitches and then sort of just dissecting. What do they do? What do we like? What can we learn from that? So in a moment, I'm going to ask you to do that. We'll go ahead and pull up your course and I see it has a 4.7 rating out of five with nearly a thousand reviews, many thousand students. And I've been on Udemy long enough to know you don't get that unless it's a great course. Full disclosure, I haven't taken the course yet, but I do know enough about the Udemy ecosystem that you can't fake that. If someone has a course that has a5.0 rating but there's only two reviews doesn't mean anything other than the fact that it wasn't promoted well. But when you've got nearly a thousand ratings in a 4.4.7 review, that says to me your students really see what you're doing is highly outstanding. So we're going to go to this in just a moment. So I want you to get get ready and be prepared for that. And while we're giving him just a second to think, I'll do my own plug. If you are thinking of doing interviews like this speeches, you want to improve your own zoom performance. You have to give live in person speeches or presentations and you want to learn a lot f than the trial and error process that I did my first 15 years. You may want to consider joining our high stakes presenter program. There's a free training. I'll link to it in the description below. High stakespresenter.com absolutely free video training, sort of a mini course that will teach you tips on how to learn much faster. It took me about 15 years to become a good presenter. Now I started when I was 12, about to graduate from sixth grade. If you want to spend 15 years, you can do it the long tedious way I did or you could do it much faster. Okay, Stan, we've pulled up your course here, the complete mindfulness and meditation training. I want you to imagine that I'm a typical Udemy student. I've just typed in mindfulness. This comes up and so do about 10,000 other courses. I'm willing to push the preview chord, the video. I'm willing to push one button to learn about you for 60 seconds. Now what do you want me to hear?

Yeah, thank you. So I would say there's at least two main reasons that I could give you for taking this course. And I think the first one is that it really is one of the most, if not the most comprehensive mindfulness and meditation course on Udemy and perhaps out there. So what what I try to do is really bring all my experience that I've had as a mindfulness trainer over the years and package it into one course. And I combined elements from the main mindfulness programs, mindfulness based stress reduction, mindfulness cognitive therapy, but also added elements of positive psychology, happiness research, and even made the link between Western mindfulness and mindfulness in the Eastern wisdom traditional. So it's quite a complete course that you get that way and you will be learning from me personally as a trainer with over 5 years of experience and teaching to many in many interesting or to many high end corporations. Good.

A lot of good stuff there. What is the number one benefit that I will instantly experience in my life after taking this course?

I would say the main benefit is that you feel more present in your own life, more connected to the present moment and you will have built or created more self awareness which will help you to reduce stress, to communicate more mindfully and so on.

Great. A lot of good stuff there Stan. And one question I have. I like the fact that you say complete in the title because I've experienced much in the in the Udemy ecosystem where every course is basically the same price. I give the analogy. It's kind of like you're out late at night on a Saturday night with your friends. Everyone's hungry. There's two restaurants across the street from each other. They're each $20 for the buffet. One of them has seven entrees and two desserts. One of them has 200 entrees and 300 desserts. They're both the same price. Which restaurant are you going to? You're probably going to go to the one that then it's all the other choices. Now you're never going to eat 200 entrees but it just seems like a better value. So that's why I kind of came up with following others. It wasn't my original idea of naming courses complete and making them longer because they tend to do better on Udemy other platforms it can be different. People want a short period of time. My only question about your your title is I'm seeing parentheses MBCT slash mbsr. I have no idea what those things mean and as a general principle I would just. And you may have a great reason for putting it there. My only bit of feedback would be if you're doing a title to attract your ideal audience are you make certain you're only using words and symbols that instantly are understandable to them. I have no idea what it is. So you're want to fill this in.

That's a good point actually. And let's say that that's the part of the title that I've changed the most. Basically, MBCT and MBSR refer refers to the two main mindfulness protocols out there, Mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy. I think the main reason why for now I've kept it in is because I've noticed that about 4% of people that come and subscribe to the Course, do find it by typing in MBCT or MBSR in the search bar.

Okay, so that's a great question.

Yeah. But I do also get your point. That, and I've thought about putting something different in the title, maybe putting mbct MBSR in the subtitle. But for now I've. I've kept it.

So what I really like about your answer is it wasn't just your gut. You looked at data and we live in a world now where, where if you want to be a communicator, you have so much great rich data to draw from to tell you what's the connection between what you really want to talk about and what your audience wants to talk about and how can you find the intersection? Because it's all wonderful to say, you know, be authentic and just say what you want to say. But sometimes you do that and turns out nobody else in the world cares what you have to say. I experienced that early in my career as a political talk show host. People. It just didn't resonate. I failed miserably. I once talked on a late night talk show in Miami beach from midnight to 4am didn't get a single call. What I wanted to talk about did not resonate with whatever audience was there. So I'm really glad that you're looking at data and tweaking. Certainly when you're talking about promoting a product that you put time, energy and effort in creating, whether it's an online course, whether it's a book, looking at the data is essential. Many of our viewers, and I'm sure a lot of your friends have read the book the Four Hour Work Week. Well, that wasn't just something that came out of Tim Ferriss head as an epiphany. It wasn't. What a big shot editor at a New York City publishing house came up with. Tim Ferriss, to his credit, tested dozens of titles and other titles. I think his favorite title was, you know, Confessions of a Drug Lord and How to Be an Outlaw. They had all these titles and the title, the Four Hour Workweek went through the roof. Much more popular. And because of listening to data, he was able to create an entire fantastic career. That book has sold millions and millions and millions and millions of copies. In part there's a lot of interesting ideas in there, but part of it, it's the best title ever for a book in that genre. So I'm very happy. So folks interested in mindfulness, they can go to the Udemy platform. It's too, it's too small to see here but it's letter U, D E M y dot com. It's a little hard to see. It's in full disclosure. I have a couple hundred courses there as well. It's an open platform, so any of our viewers can also post their courses there. But you can see it right there. And again, the name of it is the Complete Mindfulness and Meditation Training. It's on sale today. Normally $79. It's 80% off. And I think you can quite frequently find a very good price for this course. So thanks so much for. For sharing that with us, Stan. We wish you continued good luck with that course.

Thank you.

How did you take us through your journey? I mean, you. You're even more traditional than I was. I mean, I started off the route of, you know, go to an elite university, get accepted to a top 20 law firm. Where I sort of exited that ramp was I decided not to go to law school at all. But you have a master's degree, an advanced degree in law. How did you go from sort of a straightforward, traditional, linear career, the type of career that pleases most parents, into this mindfulness world? How did you get.

Thanks. That's a great question. And I think I usually. I think I can answer that by saying a combination of passion and personal struggle. So I told you a little bit about the anxiety that I struggled with when I was growing up and also as a student, as a law student. So my studies were going great. I had everything under control, you can say. But on the inside, you know, I felt quite insecure. I had a lot of anxiety. I felt tired all the time. And it was towards the end of my studies that I really started talking about this with other people. And one of my best friends at the time actually invited me to do a mindfulness training together. So it was in our university, in a university town. We went to do it, and from the start, I felt like, wow, there was a click with mindfulness. First of all, I noticed I'm not the only person on the planet that has, you know, struggles with stress or anxiety or overthinking. But also the tools seem to be quite useful. So actually, since that day, it's been over 10 years ago, I've been practicing with mindfulness constantly. Maybe not always meditating, but applying these principles of mindfulness, looking at your experience and processing your stress and emotions. So I finished my studies, and then a second thing happened that kind of got me off track, or off the beaten track, you could say, is that my brother invited me to go travel together. So right after my studies, I started traveling with my brother. And what started off as six, an idea for six months ended up being five years abroad.

That's a lot of travel.

Yeah, traveling, working abroad, living abroad. I also met a girlfriend, my ex girlfriend now. So I also live the year in Mexico. So. And throughout this process of traveling, forgive.

Me for interrupting, this was roughly 10 years ago. So this is, this is prior to a lot of people really embracing the idea of being the digital nomad. Am I getting the time frame correct?

True, true.

So how did you support yourself? What's, what sort of work did you do to support yourself? Because a lot of people are watching this saying, wow, that would be great, but especially 10 years ago, how do you do that without rich, generous parents?

Well, I guess if you want to sustain it, you need to work. Right? And I think usually for young people, one of the places that I can recommend, obviously is Australia or New Zealand. These are typical backpacker friendly places where you can do work and make a living as well. So we got very fortunate in Australia, my brother and I, we worked for a year in the photography sector actually, where we did photo shoots for kids. And that actually we did quite well. We were promoters, but we also assisted the photo shoots and we had a great year. We became trainers and that was all great. But after that year we had to leave Australia. So that was enough money that I saved to travel another year. And basically that's how I continued over the years. Working at times, at other times not working. And when traveling, traveling to, let's say, the more affordable places in the world, places like South America or Asia. And then I did spend a year in Mexico City, living there as well. And that's really where I started doing more and more mindfulness trainings, focusing on that. And that's where I also created this.

I want to make sure I'm getting the. I want to make sure I'm getting the career path straight. You, you got a degree, a college degree, a law degree, but you then supported yourself with your photography skills. Is that, Am I, am I understanding it correctly? The career path?

Yes. No, the career path is finishing my studies and then going traveling, which is adventure time. Right. And along that path of adventure time, photography at that time was a good opportunity that came to learn a lot of different things, but it wasn't part of my career trajectory. It was more part of the experience of living and working abroad.

That paid the bills, that paid for the food and the rent.

Yes, exactly. So to bring it back on the career trajectory along the way I realized I want to do more with mindfulness. I don't necessarily want to become a lawyer. So I started teaching by myself. I started doing trainings in Mexico. I recorded the mindfulness training in Mexico. And then when I came back to Belgium, I got the opportunity to work for a mindfulness organization in Belgium that does trainings and teacher trainings and in company trainings. I worked there for five years as a manager and a mindfulness trainer. Now I'm working for a Dutch organization that does. It's a very similar business, you could say mindfulness and mindfulness related trainings and teacher training. And then now I'm focusing more on also creating more courses for myself and more on online presence and creating new Udemy courses and so on.

Okay, great. In a moment, I'm going to ask you to give us another pitch because again, the audience of the TJ Walker Success Channel, they're giving pitches themselves. They like to study pitches. We like to learn the best. By the way, much better with a light.

Yeah, it's getting dark here.

Shame on me for not having mentioned that at the beginning. So here's what I really want to know. Let's say I am. I'm the head of training leadership development for IBM Europe. You're now the representative of your big mindfulness training company and I've agreed to meet with you. I want to hear how you pitch because if I'm, if I'm head of leadership development and training for IBM in Europe, I'm getting inundated every single day. I open my email in the morning, there's a thousand emails from training companies, my phone is getting calls, I'm getting nice slick mailers. All the. I'm overwhelmed. But now I'm giving you a couple of minutes to pitch your wares, so to speak. I want to hear because in my own mind, I don't really know I know how to pitch public speaking training and media training to someone like that because that's what I've done for decades. But I'm just really curious as to how you pitch a really busy learning and development director on mindfulness skills at the corporate level. So let's hear it.

Absolutely. Now, most of my pitch would consist of questions. So if I do get a chance to have meetings, usually within our organizations, we do have many organizations coming to us, many companies coming to us. And then it's most mostly about listening to what's happening in the company. What's happening, for example, in leadership, if it's a leadership training or what's happening at the employee level. So what are the things that the employees, for example, are struggling with? What are the stress factors at this moment? At IBM there are often maybe many changes within the organization or certain expansions or restructurings. There might be things like having very tight deadlines, too much, too high of a workload. So I usually, we try to map out what's the situation. And you know, of course, if there is high, if there are high levels of stress, then we can then pitch why mindfulness can be helpful to reduce that stress and to help employees, for example, to manage it all and to process, for example, the difficult experiences that they might have when they are quite stressed. So that's how I would approach it. So I haven't really pitched it to you, but I wanted to give you at least.

Yeah, let me make up a hypothetical. I mean, full disclosure. I should say IBM is not a client, current client of mine. I maybe trained someone from there 30 years ago, but I'm just making this up. But what if I say to you, look, we have a real problem with our company culture in that all of our meetings end up going for two hours long. Everyone's on their cell phone the whole time. I can't tell people to get off of it because our CEO and all of our C level executives, the whole time they're in meetings, they're multitasking, they're sending text, they're reading email, they're oh, I just got a Message on, on WhatsApp. Oh, what's going on there? So how do you change a culture like that when from the top down everybody's mind is in two or three places at once?

Yeah, absolutely. That would be a very good question. And I think especially the example of smartphones that you gave, it's quite difficult to have meetings where everyone has their full attention if at the same time they're constantly being distracted by smartphones. So I think what I would recommend is if that is the culture to see if there could be some investment in mindfulness related training where we look with employees at how they can manage their attention optimally, whether that's in meetings, but also outside of meetings. So what we want to create is a situation where rather than constantly being pulled, attention, being pulled in all kinds of directions by, let's say, external circumstances that everyone working at IBM, for example, can consciously choose what they pay attention to in the moment. And also to create a culture where, if there are meetings, for example, where maybe smartphones are put aside, where perhaps we can do simple mindfulness practices to get everyone present in that meeting before we start and to then see what the effects would be on meetings and also on the relationships between colleagues when there is an actual, you know, present.

Let's. I'd like to scratch a little deeper there. Do you have success in getting companies to actually change a policy and to really do the put your cell phone in a box before you come into the room, because that fascinates me. I would love to see that, but I'm skeptical about how often you're able to make that happen. Do you have any stories or examples of that?

Well, at the end of the day, it's up to the company, right? And as mindfulness trainers, as external trainers, what we give, what we can give is advice. What we can give is what we can tell is what works in terms of attention, in terms of attention management, in terms of well being. And what I've noticed is that especially when management or management levels are present and enjoying the mindfulness training, they will be more likely to then also execute certain things. And I have never really given the suggestion that people should put all their phones in a box, but at least to really take a moment at the beginning of a meeting to say, hey, can we all agree to put the phone on silent mode or on airplane mode for the duration of the meeting? And you do see that certain organizations pick up on that. And then if they see the positive results, then that reinforces, of course, the behavior. Another example would be short meditation or mindfulness practices right before starting the meeting. One minute of paying conscious attention to your breath. One minute of checking in to see what your current mood or stress or energy levels are before starting. We also get a lot of good feedback about that. So that's specifically with meetings. Two of the things that generally do tend to be helpful.

Stan, switching gears are you? And by the way, this is a perfect moment to point out if you're getting any value out of this video, please do several things like the video subscribe to this channel Sign up for notifications Share it on another platform just hit one button. Share it to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you like to be. Also post a comment or question in the comments section because Stan has told me he's going to look at them and he'll answer them for you. Right Stan? That's no problem, right? So feel free to post your questions even though we're not live now and Stan should get back to you or give you another resource or if it's a question to me, I will get back to you and respond to you in the comments section as well. Stan switching gears. I want to know what your philosophy is about mindfulness apps because there's a lot of them out there and there's one school of thought that says the last thing people need in a busy, cluttered world, in a stress free world is yet another excuse to pick up their phone. But there's another school of thought that says no, no. If you've got a meditation app or a mindfulness app, it can be very helpful if you just do that one thing and everything else is off. I know personally I do a daily meditation where it's just the audio record app because I've recorded myself doing a self guided meditation for 10 minutes and I just listen to that with my eyes closed and earpieces in and I've been doing that for about five years. I like it, but that's about as low tech as you can possibly get without turning your phone off. So what are your thoughts on meditation and mindfulness apps?

I think they're great. I think, yeah. It's something that you also mentioned in your course, I think on mindfulness is that it's a two edged sword, right. A smartphone is both at the same time the greatest source of distraction, especially social media. And on the other hand, it's the greatest tool, right? You can use it with all these valuable apps. There are many valuable meditation apps out there. There are other apps on, you know, positive affirmations or relaxation. So there's, it's about finding ways to leverage the technology without it dominating your life and without it, you know. So in other words, making conscious choices to pay attention to certain things that are useful on the smartphone without getting lost in the, let's say addictive doom scrolling behaviors that many of us do get lost in often. So I'm a fan of apps. I think whether you do a course on udemy or practice through an app, whatever works and as long as it's used in a positive way.

And I guess it could be positive, but then again if you're getting notifications five times a day, hey, you didn't do your mindful mindfulness exercise today. That can create stress. I mean one of the things I do teach in my all of my personal development courses is don't allow notifications on your phone and life will be a lot less stressful. Full disclosure, you mentioned, I do have an affirmations slash habits app that I'd love for people to check out. It's called Ultimize. You can see a link to that in the about us section of my YouTube channel, so. But it's Ultimize U L T A M I Z e dot com. If you could check that out. It's sort of the. The next generation of all the themes I worked on in my mindfulness course and other courses in personal development. Now, Stan, let me ask you a personal question. What do you do when you're with friends or family members or. And I have no idea if you're married or not. I don't even want to know. I'm not asking. But if, let's say you're on a. Back in the day, when you're on a date or you have friends who are single and you're trying to have a meal, you're having a conversation, you're having a glass of wine, and someone just starts doing. How do you react? I know personally, it annoys me. I mean, if I'm having dinner with my wife and daughter, I say, no, we're not going to do that. I don't even give my daughter access to a phone. But I try to keep them away at dinner time, mealtime. But how do you do that with friends? I mean, you're a lot younger than I am, so you must have. You're not single. You must have friends who are single. What's the protocol now for engaging and having to tolerate someone not being mindful to the conversation, but instead getting all their attention to a cell phone when there's a human being right there?

I think I'm definitely younger than you, T.J. but I'm also not the youngest, so I'm 35, so I would be millennial, right? And we have the Generation Z generation after us. And I think generation between generations, it really changes, right? I think for me, and I would say most of my friends, we really don't appreciate it, especially if we're with someone one on one and they're checking their phone all the time. I mean, checking it for a second to see, to check the time, that's fine. But usually if I would have a friend that's constantly checking the phone, I would ask him, hey, what's going on? Is there something important that you need to check your phone for? And I have a friend that usually never does that. And last time he was doing it and he said, oh, yeah, my friend, she's checking up on me, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm okay. If for him, that's needed in that moment and it's not something he does always, that's fine. If people have the tendency to always Just spend more time paying attention to the phone than to me, then I will object or, you know, I don't think that's good for relationships. I think it gets in the way.

Have you, here's the big question. Have you ever ended a friendship? Maybe you didn't tell the person, but you've decided, I'm not going to call that person to get together for lunch or dinner anymore. They're spending all their time on their phone. Have you ever ended a relationship over that? Essentially lack of mindfulness?

I don't think so. But let's say that if I would go on a first date with someone and that would happen, it would be a huge red flag, you know, to have someone responsibly on their phone. It just means that either they find their phone more important in that time or they feel so uncomfortable that they need to escape to the phone that they're really not comfortable with this one on one interaction. I mean, there can be other reasons, but I usually would be curious to explore, like why that's happening. But if there's not, I mean, if it's not a good explanation, then for me that, that does become a problem.

Yeah. I can't even.

For you, TJ.

Today's my 11th. Today's my 11th wedding anniversary. So I'm so old. These, all these tinders and things of swiping weren't even around when I was really single. So I can't imagine how annoying that would be. Because if someone's on a date and they're. They're swiping other date options in front of you that just. Yeah, and I've heard of that happening. Hey, Stan, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to give you the last couple of minutes to give our audience some tips on if they've never done anything to do with mindfulness, how can they sort of put their toe in the water? How can they get started in two areas? One, with general mindfulness, two, with how they can be more mindful with their communication.

I think when we're looking at mindfulness in general, it really depends on your level of curiosity about the subject. So if you're someone who has been hearing about mindfulness and you think it could be useful to you and you want to invest some time in it, then doing a course, for example, on Udemy or even a live mindfulness training, that's just a great way to lay the foundations. Right. And usually I would say that if you do it live in a group, that's even better. But these online Trainings, such as the trainings that you and I have on Udemy, they're quite good as well already. So I think those are nice introductions and if you would like to get maybe more of a tease, then I think there's certain meditation apps where you can also get some free trials and learn something. I will also be creating shorter courses on certain specific topics around mindfulness in the coming months. Whether that's mindfulness for a busy professional or mindfulness for stress management or for self care. There's a few themes that I will also be publishing. So yeah, I think if it is interesting just finding certain first ways in and I think doing a course or a training generally will be quite helpful. Great.

Well Stan, thanks so much for being our guest today. We're going to link to your Udemy course in our description below. And is there any place else where you would like people to reach out to you and find you?

Well, I think anyone can reach me on LinkedIn as well so that Stan Cerules if yeah, I see my name there on the screen. You can reach there as well. Yes, and I could share my email address as well if that's useful. So maybe I can share it with you. TJ or you have it already. I. Sure, yeah, sure.

We can post. We can post that in the link as well. Stan, thanks so much for being our guest today. I want to thank everyone for watching and again, check out Stan's course. By the way, if you don't, if you haven't been to Udemy before, they do a fantastic job of letting you really preview a course. I can watch the entire course overview. Let's just, let's just share with people for one minute so they know what we're talking about here. I'm on his course page where it's blue. I can click that and I can actually watch it. So you don't have to just. You don't have to just take someone's word for it. You don't have to just take a blind jump. You can actually experience the instructor. We can learn it's all about habits. Another lecture anywhere where it's blue and highlighted. We can learn about the dog and his owner for one of your examples, our inner experience. All of these things you can preview. How to reduce stress mindfully. All of these are available. How to deal with difficult emotions. All of those are completely available without you having to make that final decision to make the purchase. So that's kind of the beauty of Udemy and one of the reasons why they are the number one course marketplace, they make it really easy for students to feel comfortable before pulling out their credit card is. You can. You can check, you can see if you like the person's approach. So a lot of people obviously love your approach, Stan, because you've got thousands and thousands of students, almost a thousand reviews and an extraordinarily high rating. So people obviously, like. A certain number of people like listening to you. A certain number of people really like listening to me. But other people say, oh, I don't want to look at this guy with bad hair and beady eyes. I mean, people leave all sorts of comments.

I love the way how you present, actually on your. I'm just checking your mindfulness course and just the way that you tend to speak. Like, you can see the communication experience that's there. So it's a lot of fun to listen to, actually. And you do cover a lot of different topics as well, so, yeah, I enjoy it.

Well, thanks so much, and I'm looking forward to your course as well, Stan. Thanks so much and we'll see you next time.