Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

This latest podcast is part four of a funny and useful conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including;

• Low stress mindset for high performance on a variety of unstructured and unpredictable tasks
• Meditation & centering for executives
• Transforming overwhelm into flow
• Procrastination
• Creating vs. fixing
  • “Something’s wrong, & it’s me!”

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It Comes Down to This

 

When you are visited by your personal demons – your fears, anxieties, doubts and wounds – can you sit down and have tea with them?

Can you turn your attention toward the demons and explore what you can learn about yourself?

For many reasons, we often can’t. But the intention to investigate that which is between you and feeling free can sometimes result in new possibilities where none previously existed.

 

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The acronym RAIN can be helpful.

 

R = Recognize or Realize what is happening

 

A = Accept or Allow your experience to be what it is

 

I = Investigate or be Intimate with what is here

 

N = When we can do the above, you may begin to experience a degree of

Non-attachment, Non-judging and and Natural awareness

 

 

As I mentioned, sometimes we can’t shift unpleasant sensations, emotions or mental conditions easily or quickly.  Over time, with patience, consistency and presence, we begin to feel more confidence that we can be with whatever arises.

–Jonathan Foust

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Professor Elizabeth Blackburn is the discoverer of telomeres, tiny units of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect and stabilize our genetic blueprints. Telomeres seem to act as a biological clock that limits the live span of cells–and of ourselves.

psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres. … We looked at the measures for cardiovascular disease — bad lipid profiles, obesity, all that stuff. The women with those had low telomerase. … Researchers have found that the brain definitely sends nerves directly to organs of the immune system and not just to the heart and the lower gut.

 

A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH H. BLACKBURN
Finding Clues to Aging in the Fraying Tips of Chromosomes
New York Times
July 3, 2007

mindfulness meditation techniques appear to shift cognitive appraisals from threat to challenge, decrease ruminative thought, and reduce stress arousal. Mindfulness may also directly increase positive arousal states. … meditation may have salutary effects on telomere length by reducing cognitive stress and stress arousal and increasing positive states of mind and hormonal factors that may promote telomere maintenance.

Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging?
Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres.
Epel, Daubenmier, Moskowitz, Folkman, & Blackburn
University of California San Francisco
Department of Psychiatry August, 2009

The findings also suggest that exercise may prevent this damage. ,,, Among those who exercised, perceived stress was unrelated to telomere length.

Exercise May Prevent Impact of Stress on Telomeres, A Measure of Cell Health
UCSF News
April 4, 2011 

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

– Søren Kierkegaard

What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.

Now thyself is more important than Know thyself.

Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be greener pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.

–Mel Brooks

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

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Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula, areas shown to be involved in the integration of emotion and cognition.  Meditators may be able to use this self-awareness to more successfully navigate through potentially stressful encounters that arise throughout the day.

Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. Connections between sensory cortices and emotion cortices play a crucial role in processing of emotionally salient material and adaptive decision making.

The main focus of Insight meditation is the cultivation of attention and a mental capacity termed ‘mindfulness’, which is a specific nonjudgmental awareness of present-moment stimuli without cognitive elaboration. This form of meditation does not utilize mantra or chanting. Participants were not monks, but rather typical Western meditation practitioners who … meditated an average of once a day for 40 minutes, while pursuing traditional careers in fields such as healthcare and law [some were meditation or yoga teachers].

–Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness
by Sara W. Lazar, Massachusetts General Hospital
Catherine E. Kerr, Harvard Medical School
Rachel H. Wasserman, Yale University and others.

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) consists of multiple forms of mindfulness practice, including formal and informal meditation practice, as well as hatha yoga.

Although there is no explicit instruction in changing the nature of thinking, or emotional reactivity, MBSR has been shown to:

• diminish the habitual tendency to emotionally react to and
  ruminate about transitory thoughts and physical sensations;
• reduce stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms;
• modify distorted patterns of self-view;
• amplify immune functioning;
• enhance behavioral self-regulation; and
• improve volitional orienting of attention.

Recent functional neuroimaging studies of MBSR have provided evidence of reduced narrative and conceptual and increased experiential and sensory self-focus at post-MBSR and decreased conceptual–linguistic self-referential processing from pre- to post-MBSR.

The formal practice consists of:

• breath-focused attention,
• body scan-based attention to the transient nature of sensory experience, Read the rest of this entry »

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