Staying Centered When Everything Is Coming at You

Managing attention is more important than managing technology

00:00Announcer: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:27Bill Gallagher: Zen monks don't have Slack, and maybe you shouldn't either. Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher. I want to talk to you about staying centered and staying focused and drawing a little more from what monks do and a little less from your Slack channel.

00:46Bill Gallagher: Hey, so I host the show, the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We bring to our show to you every week. We've done more than 650 of these episodes now. You can get it wherever you are getting it right now, so turn on your notifications, subscribe, like it, like that kind of thing, and we'll send you them every week. You can also go to our website where we can give you an assessment of the growth potential for your business and some possible paths to grow and scale. And we do workshops. We have coaching cohorts and programs and things like that that you could join. Love to help you out. We've helped many companies go past $100 million, a handful go past a billion, and over a thousand now get to the first million in sales. I love doing this work because I get to help you grow, but I don't have to be there every day doing it. Anyway, find out about all of what we do at scalingcoach.com. Love to help you achieve some results that you would be happy to do.

Learning meditation at age six

01:36Bill Gallagher: So back to the topic. Right? Zen monks don't use Slack and there's something to learn from them. The thing that makes a big difference is being able to be focused, to pay attention, to have a clear mind, to deal with whatever's throwing at you. Especially in moments where it seems like everything is coming, like everything all at once, everywhere, all the time. Right?

02:02Bill Gallagher: When I was six years old, I don't know what I was like at six, but my parents took me to learn meditation. The first meditation I learned, I've gone on to learn many others. And today, various kinds of meditation are a daily practice for me. Sometimes it's fairly informal, like background, like not even structured. You might not even, I might not even think about it till I point out, oh yeah, I was meditating then.

02:28Bill Gallagher: But an ability to focus the mind. Now, I am pretty ADD. ADD, ADHD, there's not a specific diagnosis, but I know that I'm creative, innovative, and that I can't keep attention. I lose track of what I'm doing moment to moment. Handheld devices, things like that are powerful, but they also are murder on that kind of thing. The availability, the pervasiveness of the messaging and the media and the things that we have are a struggle. Except I do also know what's possible in mindfulness practice, in particular meditation.

03:06Bill Gallagher: So my parents took me, I probably was an energetic, strong-willed, bright kid already at that age. And they took me and learned the first kind of meditation. I've gone on and learned many other kinds of meditation, mindful practices. I've done retreats. I've done silent retreats. I've done anyway, just a whole big range of them. And I use lots of them today. There are ones that I come back to that I particularly love. And then others that I use less often, it didn't connect with me. And I like, I think there's a fixation maybe for some of us on there's a particular kind and it looks a way and it has, there's many purposes for doing it. It's about developing spiritual practices, mindfulness practices that center us, that remind us who we are, what matters to us, help us focus in to control the crazy brain, to take us back to what we deeply care about, like that kind of thing.

04:06Bill Gallagher: As we grew up from that age, shortly after that, we moved. And we lived for a while in the early 1970s with three kids and two parents in a van traveling around Europe. So you can imagine one kid in diapers, one who hasn't learned to read yet, the other one somewhere in between, three kids and a couple of young parents, idealistic, traveling around Europe in a van and camping. We live some places as well over the next period. But like that early practice and then some of the things that I picked up along the way made a difference.

Finding the mindfulness practices that work for you

04:49Bill Gallagher: Now, I grew up speaking a total of four different languages. I've worked in many different industries. I love consuming lots of different things. In between recording shows today, I'm playing loud music, like loud, engaging music of different beats, like for myself. And sometimes that anchors. You've heard of people studying and they play music with a like an incessant beat to it. And that can actually help to focus the mind to get it into some kind of a groove pattern. Other times, I might just take a walk and look up into the trees and think about, think, or gaze into a night sky if you happen to be somewhere where you could see the stars at night.

05:27Bill Gallagher: Like, so awe walks, just walking itself, putting an attention on the fall of the foot and the movement through and the rise of the toes. Right? Like, if you're watching the video segment, you could see me moving my hands like a stride on a foot. Like that, extremely thoughtfully, could we do that? Like, just bringing the focus in. Body scan is one of my favorite ones. Breathwork, where I'm just focusing on my breath, doing different kinds of breathing. Body scan is one of the favorite ones that I come down to. Visualization, I'm fairly naturally hallucinogenic and it could go all over the place, but if I will quiet my mind and focus in on things and then look for things, I can find images and follow them. It's a capacity you might develop in yourself to imagine and take yourself to places. But it's all about learning to use our mind and use the things in the world around us rather than letting it use us.

Learning to let notifications go when they come in

06:24Bill Gallagher: So what are the spiritual practices that you've ever been exposed to that you'd like to do more? Is there one that's caught your interest that you'd like to learn more of? I don't think there's a right answer for it. It's finding a few things that work for you and then playing with it, expanding them. Every now and then I learn a new one and I try that. There are ones I go back to that kind of thing.

06:46Bill Gallagher: If you're scattered already, technology, media, communication technology is just going to expand, or it's not going to, like not turning on, turning off notifications, managing your tech will help you. But if you're already scattered, you know, it's just going to play into that. So we want to manage not just the tools like turning on or off notifications as your ability to let the notification go when it comes in. Right? So part of it is the turning off the bleeps and blurbs and things like that grab your attention, the alarms, the horns, the rings. But the other part is just learning to let them go. Could be there are things in our environment. Right? A noise happens outside the house and boom, your mind goes somewhere or outside your office. Managing yourself, your attention regardless of what the alarms are, that kind of thing can make as much difference as managing the alarms.

07:43Bill Gallagher: And then balancing the immediate environment and what's going on with what really matters to you is really good. Now, you could be someone or you could not be someone who is great at managing that external stimulus. I know that with time and practice and maybe some innate characteristics that like literally there can be alarms, sirens, gunshots, bombs, and I can stay focused and calm.

08:13Bill Gallagher: But the first reaction is like a trigger. I have to go, oh yeah, that happened, and then come back. What really matters? What's going on right now? So I can do that. You could probably do more of that as well if you learn to focus. So how could you let not the craziness of the world, whether it's your devices or your technology, and then bring yourself back to the kinds of things that actually matter, right, in you. So what do I care about today, this week? What matters in the grand scheme of my life? What connects me to the universal and the eternal things? Whatever that is for you. Do you have a religious or spiritual practice? Do you have meditation or prayer or other kinds of anchors? How does fitness play? How is your rest? How do you manage your nervous system? How do you keep yourself within a window of control or reasonable and where do you go outside?

How you end one day sets up the next

09:11Bill Gallagher: I think how we manage ourselves starts at the beginning and the end of the day, particularly affects the middle. So if I don't set up my day right the night before, I wake up behind the gun. I wake up after, like, whatever it is, not clear where I am and that kind of thing. So finishing one day leads into the next day, and then the way that I wake in the morning makes a difference. So I do it sometimes. I wake and I go right to a device. I look for a message, an update of something. Did something happen in another part of the world overnight that I need to know about that I was thinking about? It's not great when I do it. I do it too often.

09:50Bill Gallagher: It's better when I wake up and I notice my body. Oh, I still have a body. I still breathe. I'm alive. Oh, notice my environment. Oh, how do I feel? Oh, stretch, lean into it. Oh, use the bathroom. Go get some coffee. Oh, notice the trees outside my window.

What to notice when you wake up in the morning

10:12Bill Gallagher: There are things then that are great, and then there are things that are not great. Now, I will read quite a bit in the morning. I will reflect. I will think. I may even do closed-eye kinds of things, or I may do an open-eye kind of meditation. There's something in every morning. Some mornings I'll take a hot tub. All of those kinds of things will set up the day. The kinds of exercise, the way I do it, the tone, no matter what I'm doing, the temperament that I bring to it, help me to bring it. Some days I want to start to build energy because I'm going to go out. Other days I want to calm myself down. There's a range of things. Sometimes I want to be focused. What is it in your day? And then there are the recurring things that happen almost every day, just kind of like on autopilot. Those are harder to shift, those things. So what is it that would set your day up well that begins your day? And then what is it, how do you end the day that sets up the next one correctly? What are the things that you're currently doing? And what would you like to try? I'm more interested not in having you redesign everything and create some miracle morning that you sustain for like 30 days, then you make a small change to things that you're doing now to begin to shift it. And if you're going to try to bring in a new practice, is there something that you would give up to make room for it? Or is there a shift in the way that you do something that you do already that makes a difference? And can you build it over time? And can you create it in such a way that it's reinforced by your environment, the people in your environment, the structure, the physical nature of your environment, so that it's called for?

Making small shifts instead of overhauling everything

11:44Bill Gallagher: So in my world and that kind of thing, I have a fantastic view out my bedroom window as soon as I sit up in bed. I have that. And that is part of a kind of meditation for me every morning, just to look at the trees, to think about the passing of seasons, the animals, the people, the things that are going on beyond. I look out into a very sort of nature-like, tree-filled front yard. That's part of my thing. Other times, I'll take the walk around, as I mentioned. I'll notice the walk, I'll look up into the trees, but I could be, as I'm often very much on the road, then I might take a walk on the beach, or I might do something like that to help calm and center, remember my intention for the day. What's my focus? What do I want to do? So centering, focusing, and then at various points in the day, I just did something. Let's breathe. Let's pause. Let's reset before I do the next thing. What's your practice? How are you going to upgrade what you already do? What would make a difference for you and your mindfulness? I hope that we can bring a little calm, a little centeredness in the face of the craziness of our world, reality, technology, media, so those things are powerful for you, not a thing that gets you, that throws you off your game. Hope that's helpful for you. I look forward to talking to you again soon.

12:59Bill Gallagher: I want a big thanks in to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, to Juan and Anna who produce our show, to all of you for watching, for listening. If we can help you more, if you'd like to know more about our coaching, our cohorts for helping you find more focus and effectiveness in your identity, an assessment on growing your business and evolving your leadership, any of that kind of thing, go to scalingcoach.com. You'll find more than 650 episodes now of this show, including our guest episodes and my solo episodes, all that and more at scalingcoach.com. Also, wherever you're getting this right now, like it, subscribe it, like that kind of thing. Share it with somebody else. That helps them and us, for sure. We'd love that. We'd appreciate that very much. And then, until next time, keep scaling.

13:51Announcer: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.