Shivani Gupta

Hi everybody, and welcome to Grow Your Business podcast. I'm Shivani and I'm so happy and excited to be here today talking to you about something that is become more and more important as a business owner as I've gotten older. When I was young, I grew up in India till I was the age of 11. And one of my cousins was deeply into meditation. And I remember I was about nine or 10 years of age, and she said to me, Shivani, you are not going to believe and I used to pretty young, the benefits of meditation. And I want to teach this to you now so that you can use this for your life. I looked at her very strangely. And I remember saying to my cousin, I'll learn that when I'm super old. And I have nothing else to do. Typical Adam 10-year-old right in terms of what you're going to say to your cousin, who was in a mid-20s.

Anyway, as I've got older, one of the things I've realized is that as business owners, it's so important to be able to meditate. 20 years ago, when I first started to meditate, you know, there was not a lot of research around, there was some research around, but some people still considered a little bit we were , some people still considered a little bit more scientific. You know, it wasn't enough science around it, it was more for certain types of people. And people had quite a few images that came into your mind when you thought about people that meditated every day. But now there's a lot of science and back backing in terms of the benefits.

So, the first thing I want to do before I say here is a couple of simple techniques that I want to share with you on this podcast. In fact, I've got so much into meditation, I don't meditate for hours a day, I wish I had the time. But with a very busy business with a very busy family with two teenagers. One of the things that I do is I meditate for about 15 minutes, there is a lot of research that talks about 12 minutes is the minimum and all the MRI scans that are talked about the fact that really if you meditate for less than 12 minutes, it doesn't have a lot of benefit, the ideal amount that I hear most people that are doing extraordinary things and I'm talking about actors like you know, Hugh Jackman, comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, you know, extraordinary people like Oprah Winfrey, all of these people meditate. And all of them meditate, usually 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening. But I don't want to freak you out, I just need to start off with 12 minutes. And they can be very simple things. Again, I'll go through the techniques with you at the end of this podcast.

 But what I wanted to do, firstly, for those of you that are a little bit cynical, and going, ah, not quite sure, I'm not sure I've read enough data, let me go through 12 Science Base benefits. And these have been proven by a number of researchers, people that have been looking into the benefits, they've measured it. And they've worked out that here are the 12 key benefits in terms of being able to look at the benefits of meditation, and hopefully one of these will resonate with you. The first one is to reduce stress, that is my number one reason I meditate. It's not always to connect to the universe, it's not always to find deeper purpose, it really is as practical as reducing stress. And as business owners, we get pretty stressed out pretty quickly on lots of things that we have to manage. And so, you know, mental and physical stress is caused by cortisol, the hormone that we're taught the stress hormone, and one of the things that happens, it starts to cause a lot of impacts of stress. So that can have inflammation, we can have disrupted sleep, we can have depression, we can get more anxious, we can get blood pressure issues, and you know, then I can the list goes on, we can get fatigued, you know, fatigue, we can get our thinking that becomes very cloudy. So, one of the things that's been studied over and over again, is when people have done six to eight week courses to really get into this habit and the art of meditation, again, minimum 12 minutes a day, what meditation has shown to do is that it reduces the stress that you feel both mentally and physically, it also has some physical benefits. And again, you can research this or you can email me and I can send you some links into that as well.

The other benefit, the second benefit of meditation is that it can control inside it. So, once it starts to manage some of the stress levels and some of the things that we feel stressed and anxious about it then starts to help you during that as well. So, there was a meta-analysis on over 1300 people, and they studied these people. And again, they did a course and then they measured it based on minimum and a little bit more meditation passed the 12-minute mark. And they found that within eight weeks, that it reduce their anxiety in terms of the statements that they said about themselves, their ability to be able to cope with things, things that were happening outside of their control, and how they were able to manage it. They've also found a number of those people, after completing the eight-week program, that they had less pain, so they actually have less chronic pain, physically, and not just anxiety as well. And you know, a lot of people talk about how yoga is very good for I do yoga, four or five times a week. And again, yes, it stretches me physically. And I don't really ever want to be a pretzel. In fact, the way my body is designed, I probably never will be a pretzel. But one of the things I find is I'm so busy doing all my parts. It's like a meditation. So, I'm doing physical activity, but it also clears my head in terms of what you do. But if you're not into yoga, meditation might be some way, one way to just really be available to alleviate a lot of that stress and anxiety that we've spoken about. And for business owners in particular, where we carry so much on our shoulders, you know, the back off and then stops with us in terms of what happens.

The third one is a bit of it sounds like a bit of a given. But it's also so important to talk about is that meditation also increases our emotional health. So, there was a study done, where there was a variety of treatments that people looked at over three and a half 1000 adults, in terms of looking at how it impacted their emotional health. And what they found was that, again, the people that did the meditation had less negative thoughts, but they also had a lot less negative images of themselves. And they started to look at themselves not saying I'm fantastic, but not be so hard on themselves. But they started to improve their emotional wellbeing, but also looking at themselves in a much more positive view, which always helps us like when we feel good about ourselves, then we are able to pass that on to our clients and our staff, and a whole bunch of ripple effects that happen in our businesses, but also in our families as well. The other thing that meditation does, in fact, a lot of teachers often talk about meditation as a tool, where they'll say, you're almost like a third person, you're almost observing your thoughts, or you start to become more aware of yourself in terms of what happens. So, you start to also get an understanding of yourself. I know for me, you know, when my one of my relationships is not working very well, whether that's in my close friendship, whether that's in my close family, you know, our inner circle of four, or my parents, or somebody in my business, I find meditation is a great tool where I'm taking some deep breaths, and I'm trying to go what is exactly happening here. And I find that rather than, you know, give up on the situation, by meditating upon it, by taking some deep breaths, I start to come up constructive ways of actually becoming aware of what I could do. And, you know, there's again been studies that have done as little you know, for two weeks, we people, you know, followed an app on meditation, and one of the things that they found was their feelings of loneliness reduced, but also their social contact, improved as a result of that, where they wanted to be able to do that, and also came up with better problem solving. So often I get that out of meditation, where I'll be meditating, and often I'll come to a solution to a problem. Some people say to me, I love running Shivani, if I can just avoid running, because I really dislike running, then I just need meditations on a very comfortable pushing for minimum 12 minutes helps me problem solve and become a better business owner, I am so much happier with that solution.

The fifth benefit of meditation is actually increases our attention span. So, again, more and more studies are showing the fact that when we meditate, one of the things that happens is that our attention span goes greater, we're able to listen better, which comes as a very important skill in being a business owner. And we're also able to worry less.

The other benefits that are shown in older people is that it also can reduce the age-related memory loss but it's the repetitiveness of it that helps you focus as your thoughts. That's the whole point of that. But mantra meditations particularly have been found in research that they can actually prevent or reduce or elongate over a longer period of time, your memory loss and it can also include improve your memory, in particularly patients with dementia. So, the fact that when you start to do that and if you then continue that meditation practice, it can really do that.

The next one is one of my favorites. When you meditate. You are kind of I know that when I meditate as a mum of two teenagers. I am a little bit kinder; I am a little bit nicer. It's because I have a little bit more of a bigger fuse. Because I've created again, that space in my diary and space in terms of what we do. And so again, there's different types of meditations. But one of the things that you can do is you can actually do meditations where you want to be a little bit kinder, you can send kindness and love to somebody that may or may not be somebody that you see every day. But you can do that. And again, they've done over 30, or 40 studies, perhaps even more another 30, or 40 studies that have already been done, where, when they did the loving kindness meditation, they found that their stress levels were better, they felt better. And they also had a lot more positive emotions, and also better, better interactions with those people, after sending them some kindness as well. And sometimes that kindness might need to be for yourself, as a business owner, where you are being very, very harsh in terms of what you do.

The next benefit is that it can also help you fight addictions. And so, the mental discipline of being able to follow that one of the things that happens is you then start to become a lot more aware of your triggers of your addictive behaviors. And one of the things that can happen when you start to redirect your attention through meditation, you start to manage your emotions better in your impulses better. There was a study done of over 100 people where they found that by doing Transcendental Meditation, which is a mantra-based meditation, they had low stress and psychological stress, but that also had reduced cravings around alcohol around food around drugs, and it really started to help them around their addictions as well.

The next one is a really big one for me. And that is that meditation can improve sleep. So almost half of the population around the world, yep, that's 50%, that's 50% of you listening today, struggle with some sort of a sleep order insomnia, don't sleep that deeply. And if you really measured your sleep, your deep sleep, it might not be very hard, that's half of us around the world. So, one of the things that meditation does, is that people that meditate over a long period of time actually stay asleep longer. And they actually have improved the severity of their insomnia, compared to the ones they didn't do any meditation as well. And they've done these studies in controlled environments, over hundreds and 1000s of people.

The last couple that I want to go through meditation can also help control pain. And so it starts to get connected more to your state of mind. And there is some research that's now indicating that meditation, your routine can help you control some of those pain. And it can improve that quality of life in terms of what you do, it can also reduce your blood pressure. So, meditation talks about the fact that it reduces the strain on your heart. And over time, high blood pressure makes the heart work harder to pump. And that’s one of the things that can relate to poor heart function. So high blood pressure also contributes to narrowing of the arteries, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. So again, the studies have been done, one of my favorites is one that they did with over 1000 people, where they actually measured them, and they worked out there, over 90% of them, 900 people have these, they really improve and decrease their blood pressure as a result of minimal meditation.

And the last benefit, which is so important, we're not asking you to go to the gym, not even asking you to put any shoes on. Meditation is accessible absolutely anywhere, you just need to find a spot I believe for it, you need to find the same spot that becomes part of your ritual. And you want to do it at about the same time when there's not that many distractions. And one of the things you want to do is just get into the habit of it. And as I always say to anybody that I'm teaching meditation to, there is no such thing as a bad meditation. I'm actually just about to qualify as a meditation and breathwork teacher, I wanted to be able to take something that was so beneficial to me and be able to teach it. So, I've started teaching some of my clients how to meditate how to do it very simply. But before I finished this podcast, I wanted to take you through two ways. Let me see which one resonates with you. And always happy for some feedback and some commentary. And so, I wanted to take you through two ways that you can meditate. And you can build that into a practice for somebody that perhaps isn't a regular meditator. So, if you're a regular meditator, this might be a little bit too simple for you, but I find that when I'm extremely stressed. Coming back to the basics is the best. So, the first one is where you breathe into the count of four, hold to the count of four, and you breathe out to the count of four and that is as simple as that. So, let's do that. Breathe in 2-3-4, hold 2-3-4 and out 2-3-4. See, if you can keep staying breathing in and out of your nose, breathe in, hold, and out. One more time in, hold, and out. And it's as simple as that. So, you can put a 12-minute timer on your phone, keep all the distractions off and literally do that breathing exercise. When your mind starts to wander, just go, yes, it's wandering, stop judging yourself, come back to breath in for four, hold for four and out for four and you have meditated, which is super, super easy.

The other one that I want to take you through, which is really great, when you started to get a lot of anxiety and stress building up in your body is that you want your exhales, you want your carbon dioxide that's stressing you to be greater than what you're inhaling. So we inhale, it's called 369, we're going to inhale for the count of three, hold for the count of six. And we're going to breathe out for the count of nine. So, let's do that. Breathe in, hold and out.

Now, if you can't hold your breath in, or exhale for that long, that's okay. You just start the cycle earlier until your capacity builds. So, three in, six hold and out 9. Let's do that another time, breathe in, hold and out.

And there are the two techniques I wanted to share with you. Please let me know if that was helpful. As a business owner, please make time to meditate, you will be amazed at what happens. And as one beautiful teacher who is anonymous. And I know that this is a quote that's been quoted many times, but I love it. It says that “you must meditate for a minimum of 12 minutes a day. But if you're really busy and you don't think you need it, meditate for half an hour. Thanks for listening.