Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 184: The Zen Priest with an MBA, Marc Lesser

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

At just 21 years old Marc Lesser took a year-long leave from his education to explore meditation. His one year leave would turn into 10 when he became the director of the first Zen monastery in the western world. He’s a Zen priest, an avid meditator and teacher, the author of several books and has been the CEO of several companies including his current company, which aims to integrate business practices with mindfulness - also the focal point of his new book Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader: Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen. The Plug Zone Website: https://www.marclesser.net/ ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, we're going to get to the episode very quickly this week. I just have two brief items of business. First is we've got a new meditation up on the app, the 10% happier app.

It's called Letting Go of the Outcom, it's with one of our most popular teachers or in Sofir, it's all about how to not be so fixated on getting your way and instead staying open, especially in a work context, which is quite relevant to what we're going to be talking about on the show this week, and I struggle with this quite a bit. So I'm going to be using that meditation. The other thing I just want to quickly say before we get to the interview this week to our guest is I just want to give a big robust shout out to the folks who have joined our insider's feedback group. This is a bunch of listeners who are giving us detailed feedback on every episode as we continue to try to get better at what we do that feedback which I see personally is really meaningful and incredibly helpful. So big thank you.

All right, let's get to our guest who has an awesome resume. He is both a Zen priest and he has an MBA from New York University NYU. Mark Lesser is perhaps best known as one of the architects of the famous meditation course that they run for Google employees called Search Inside Yourself and now it's run that corporations all over. He has done much more though, he's founded three companies including his current company, which is called ZBA, which teaches, helps people integrate meditation and other practices into their work life. He's the author of four books and as reference before, he's got an MBA from New York University. He also began his work career as a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center where he was a Zen

Priest for 10 years. He's going to talk about that. You'll hear him talk about that. And then we get to, after we talk about how he got into meditation, what it was like to be a Zen Priest for all that time, and why that experience made him fall in love with work, which somehow seems a little incongruous, but he makes it make sense. But then we get into his latest book, which is called the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. And by leader, he does not mean some helicopter

using CEO. He just means all of us in whatever context we do our work. Many of us that's in the office, but for others, it may be at home or in volunteer organization or whatever. And we talk about some of his ideas about how to go about working in a way that can actually be meaningful and can be measurably less miserable. He, in fact, one of the precepts he talks about is that you can love your work even when it sucks. He talks, and we talk a quite in-depth about how it is not useful to think you are an expert. We talk about being, what is the utility of being connected to your own pain in your life and connected to the pain of other people with whom you work? How can that help in a work context? We talk about the intensely collaborative nature of workplaces

these days and how meditation can make that collaboration even better and I'll let him explain this. He talks a lot about the need, the necessity, the value of the continuous work of making work simpler. Mark Lester's a fascinating guy. It was really fun to talk to him. Here he is. Great to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Actually, no, we have met. We met very briefly. We had an airport.

No, we met at a conference very briefly. We were at a few different. I'm not even sure which one It was New York or Washington DC or a conference where you were speaking at I Might have been doing a workshop at that conference several years ago Yes, and then we feel like I we were at a conference, but we're at the airport leaving or something Maybe somebody else maybe somebody else. Maybe. Boy, I knew where you would hang maybe. That could be.

Yes, that's the memory I have. Yeah. And then there is an email chain that we were on together for some time having to do all the people in this mindfulness, business world were on this email chain. And so, well, nice to see you again. It's good to see you too. How did you get into meditation?

I was 21 years old. I took a one year leave of absence from Rutgers. And I went initially to San Francisco to a small community called the Humanist Institute. Why would you have done that? I was, I read a book. My first book that drew me in this direction was Abraham Maslow, toward a psychology of being. And I had to read this book for college.

I discovered that book kind of woke me up to how asleep I was, reading about that this concept of self-actualization and this idea that certain people were more emotional, were happier, were sadder, were more comfortable in their own skins. What does self-actualization as someone who is, it's a high level of emotional intelligence. It's a high level of being more fully aligned as a human being, being more comfortable in your own skin, being comfortable with one's emotions, not being so tossed around by one's inner critic,

being having the ability to have really good quality, transparent, loving relationships. So to fully feel your emotions, but not to be owned by them. Yes, that would be a short cut. That's the way you're saying a high level of mindfulness quotient. High mindfulness quotient. Though then I would, I kind of maybe even broaden, I think mindfulness could certainly be defined as high level of self-awareness, ability to deal with difficult emotions,

understanding your own motivation, things like empathy and this whole broad realm of communication skills and social skills. Yeah, and then I think if I use more of the older language of mindfulness, I think of it as knowing yourself and going beyond yourself. I like that language, which is some old, old, you know, Zen language. All right, so we're far afield from your chronology here, but when you say going beyond yourself, I can imagine a listener getting hung up on that. What do you mean by that?

How do I go beyond myself? This is all I've got. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think there's some really simple ways to talk about it. One is that you actually care for real about other people. Imagine that actually really caring about people and that the world isn't only me. What's good for me? What's bad for me? Of course, we don't have to worry about losing that. Of course, we have to take care of ourselves. We need to have that question about what's good for me. What's not good for me? But I think going beyond ourselves is one in relation to other people is really caring about other people and I think it even goes beyond that.

I think even beyond other people it's having a sense of a sense of connectedness a sense of belonging to this Earth, this place, that we're not so always caught up on what's going to be our own getting ahead and our own achievement. So we feel a sense of safety, a radical sense of safety would be, so I would say safety, a radical sense of not needing anything right now and connection, that those three things, which in some way, from a psychology, I think, would say these are three basic human needs that we have. I listen to you talk, I have two things that came up in my head. First of all, when you talked about belonging to this earth and all that stuff, my inner

policeman of like, don't talk that way, goes off like, what does that mean? Belong this or that, that's like the kindergarten teacher was making me sing kumbaya, I would say some stuff like that. So I get that a little bit, but then I also, what I, what comes up is a little bit of the first time I went on a meditation retreat and I wrote about this in my first book, a first time I went on a meditation retreat where you're not doing nothing but meditating all day. I hated it. First I hated everybody.

I hated everybody who told me to do the thing. I hate it. I just was filled with hate and resentment and frustration mostly really at myself for being unable, quote unquote, unable to meditate. But then I had this relax of a better word, kind of breakthrough. Where I had 36 hours of really, I had really stopped struggling so much and 36 hours of really I had really stopped struggling so much and and was very much right where I was and If I had to whittle down the intellectual take away from that What was what what felt me a lot of it was beyond Conceptual and firmly in the perceptual in that I was just

Seeing hearing smelling whatever and then there's a lot when the mental chatter goes down and you're actually firmly in the perceptual in that I was just seeing, hearing, smelling, whatever. And then there's a lot, when the mental chatter goes down and you're actually living your life as it's presented to through your senses at any given moment, that can be a company with a lot of happiness. But the intellectual, the conceptual thing that I remember was everything's okay. I just felt like everything's fine.

And that came up for me as you were talking about this radical sense of safety and belonging on this earth, which again, part of me rebells against. Anyway, does any of the four going make any sense to you? Totally, totally. So I think in some way, you know, very practically, this is where I think that meditation practice

and daily life come together. To me, the experience that you were just describing, the sense that everything's okay right now, that the mental chatter kind of quieted a little bit and there was something that you felt. To me, it's like, that's great. That's what happens often when you sit retreats, when you sit multi-day retreats. You get sick of yourself. You get completely sick of the thing that we call I and me and your own story. There's something about you get to see that at some level it's made up. It's something that we create the story of me and I. And you just get a sense of it, you get a sense of it when you sit for multi days.

So imagine that you let that permeate into your bones in a way, and that there's some of that in how you are in the rest of your life as a leader, or as a husband, or as a son, or anything, that it's just, it's like it's really small, and I know it can sound a little, you know, kumbaya-ish, but I think it is potent. It's a really potent life-changing experience. If you can have that experience in meditation, it also can happen, I think, in other ways, something that really grabs your attention and shows you that things are not quite as black and white. The story isn't quite as solid as what you thought. It gives you great. I think it gives you a kind of flexibility and power. It's a little bit like,

you know, people often say, you know, life is short, right? Life is short. Therefore, you should live in a certain, you should live as though life is short. Well, that's easy to say, but it's harder to do. And I think this, it's that same sensibility that what you're describing in meditation is that life and you aren't quite what you had thought they were three days before when you started this retreat. Yes. I thoroughly derailed you. Let's start again. Yeah, let's talk about you. Because I want to get to how we, and I know you have a lot to say about this, how we sort of operationalize, how we can have this insight in the first place, and then how we operationalize it in our life. I want to get to that. But I first

want to walk through a little bit of how you got to where you are. So you read this book by Maslow and you're 21 and you realize that you've been asleep most of your life. And it was it was enough of a jolt that it got you to take a year off from college. It was a jolt. I think it got me to read a lot more. It got me to start read like suddenly I was Passionate about reading and learning which I hadn't been so much and I started reading everything I could

About humanistic psychology and existentialism and even a book about Zen Allen Watts the way of Zen came my way And all of this was like wow like this is amazing stuff my way. And all of this was like, wow, like this is amazing stuff. This is so much more interesting, relevant than the courses I was taking at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And there was something, I think, to, yeah, and I just felt like I need to go explore this part of my life. I found out about a program in San Francisco, a friend of my older brothers came back from San Francisco, the land where people were actually doing meditation and studying Eastern and Western mysticism. This was in the 70s.

This was in the 70s. Yep. And I decided to take a year, leave a Vapsence absence to go explore went to and it was it was a particular program that at the time they were connected to Sonoma State University. So I could sell it to my parents says, Oh, I'm going to go right to graduate school. Even though I hadn't finished my undergraduate degree. And then while I was in San Francisco, I someone handed me a book called the Tassahara Bread Book. And the Tassahara Bread Book.

It's a book about baking bread that happened to come out of a Zen monastery called Tassahara, which was part of the San Francisco Zen Center. And this book, it not only was it about baking bread, but it was about studying yourself and going beyond yourself. Through the practice of baking bread, it was also had a sense of humor. It didn't take itself too seriously. And all these things attracted me to this place called the San Francisco Zen Center. And I was working at the time I had a job downtown San Francisco just doing office work. And the bus, the six Masonic bus every day went right by the Zen Center on, you know, the corner of Pagin Laguna. I got off the bus one day and walked walked in and I completely felt like I felt at home in this place that it was beautiful and smelled good and felt good and it was very clean and the people were super friendly.

And they had basically there was no proselytizing at all. It was like our doors open every morning 530 you want to come sit meditation. You can always come sit. I started sitting meditation at the Zen Center and I ended up Staying there for that one year leave of absence turned into ten years and It was in a new never finished college. I did after 10 years. After 10 years. And came back 10

years later, came back and went right to business school and got an MBA degree. Because during that 10 year time, work became a really core part of my practice and the relationship of meditation practice and work practice were very much integrated. So let me just so you go you spend 10 years at the Zen Center and then you spend 10 you go back and finish college. There's another 10 years of work and college and MBA and then you go back for another 10 years and? No, no, no. So, no, just 10 years at the Zen Center went to and got MBA degree and then I started

companies, started companies and dove into the world of work. Where did you do your MBA? New York University right here in this lovely town. And what kind of companies were you starting? I started a publishing company, one of the first companies in the world to make things out of recycled paper. This was in 1989. I started a company called Brush Dance.

And yeah, my first job out of business school was in San Francisco working for a distributor of recycle paper. So I had this idea. I mean, my strong idea was one, there must be a way to bring these practices that I had been so involved with at the Zen Center. So I had one of the things that happened at the Zen Center was I kept getting asked to take on more and more responsibility in different areas of the organization, including running a kitchen in a Zen monastery, and the Zen monastery turns into a resort

in the summertime, this place called Tassahara. And they have a reputation for high-quality vegetarian gourmet vegetarian food. So this kitchen was like a pretty serious place of learning to cook, learning to produce the highest quality food for 70 or 80 overnight guests in the summer, because in the summertime it turned into a resort and conference center still is. And I got this experience of loving work right in the midst of what was basically a commercial kitchen with tremendous amount of pressure, intensity, things going wrong, people working closely together. It was hot. And yet there was a way that the work was very intentional about

Learning to know about yourself and going beyond yourself in the midst of this work practice. Were you a monk? I was a monk. I mean a monk a monk is Someone who lives in a monastic setting now. This was a US California monk very different than when you say that word. There were men and women practicing together. And I mean, I have some friends who are Zen priests and they're married. So it's not like a, we, we use the word monk in the Western context. We think celibacy, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm a Zen priest. I'm married. I have children. I've been CEO of several companies. I'm CEO of a company right right now. So I I very much live a life that kind of integrates again what what I think appears as two separate things these contemplative practice and and living out in the world contemplative practice and living out in the world. To me, my aspiration is to have it be one world. It's the world. It's the world of being a human being and showing up as fully as best as compassionately as responsively as I know how.

But just go back to your 10 years for a second in the monastery. So you're a monk, but you're also working. So were you doing long periods of retreat too? And how much meditation training happened? Yeah, a lot, a lot of meditation training and a good deal of work were happening at the same time. So I did, I've done, you know, many, many seven-day retreats. I've done, oh, at Atasahara, the core practice is 90-day retreats in which there is maybe five hours a day of sitting practice.

Now, if you work in the kitchen, like I did, maybe you only sit for three hours a day. There's less meditation and there's more focus on work practice. And if you're working in the kitchen, you have to talk. So it's not a silent retreat. That's right. Yeah. And I would say people who are working in any parts of the organization are talking. There's a lot of silence. So pretty much every day from, you know, from dinner time, starting at dinner till, oh, generally until mid-morning, maybe the next day is silent time. And then there's a work meeting and you're, you know, more normalized. Although even the sensibility is that the talking is less chit chat and more talk that you need to have in terms of the work and there was also time for

Connecting with people and being in relationship and there was also a good deal of kind of teacher student Discussions and talking about what you were working with. It's so interesting the different traditions. So I go on meditation retreats in the Teravada tradition and even within Teravada it's hard to be overly general because there are lots of schools within Teravada. It's a Teravada just for the uninitiated here is one of the four schools of Buddhism, which is teravada, Zen, Tibetan, holy, what's the land here land? Here land. There's many, there's many, there's many schools. Yeah, I don't know why I said four. So anyway, many schools of Buddhism. So Teravata is kind of the old school. Literally, it's the oldest school. And in these retreats that I go on, there's no talking.

I mean, no talking, 10 days or three months or whatever, I've the longest I've done is 11 days. But people go three months, they go longer. And, but the Zen tradition, at least the part, and there are many schools within Zen too, but the Zen tradition, at least the part, and there are many schools within Zen too, but the Zen tradition that you're a part of, there is talking, so it's such an interesting way to a difference in the way to approach or retreat.

So, in the Zen tradition that I'm part of, familiar with, there are retreats, so seven day retreats, no talking. They're called sashines. They're called sashines, right? Seven days retreats, called sashines. Theres, no talking. They're called sushisheans, right? Seven days retreats called sushisheans. There'd be no talking there. But when you do a 90 day practice period, there's, there's, you know, people, especially the funk, especially emphasis on functional talk, because work is such a part of

the practice. There's a couple, you brought up this term work a lot and I haven't let you sort of expound upon it. But it seems to be really important to something you got in not in the pejorative but kind of a bee in your bonnet about the connection between practice and work during these 10 years. So what why did that become so important to you? But why did that become so important to you? I found that I just loved working. I loved the work that I had. And I can remember even while I was that time when I was living at the Zen Center, there was all of this statistics about that people didn't like work.

That there were even now, I think that you'd probably seen all the latest statistics. Of course, you're next word at this, right? That that two thirds of American workers say they don't feel engaged in what they do. The level of things, not only disengagement, but, you know, suicides and people feeling incredibly unhappy in their workplace. and people feeling incredibly unhappy in their workplace. And I had a strong sense that a way to change this is to integrate more the sense of meditation practice, contemplative practice with work.

So, I know you said that after business school, you went and started some companies were you trying to put into practice this sort of philosophy that you were working on? I was and I found out how hard it is. It's hard. I mean, there is, there is and I talk about it all the time, there's a natural tension that exists between right meditation practice, contemplative practice, right, the practice of being more beingness practice, right? The practice of being more beingness and the practice of getting stuff done, of getting things done in the world, of meeting goals, of making money, of being responsible for financial statements. There's tension there, but I think it can be a positive and healthy tension.

I deal with this a lot. I'm sure you do. I deal with a lot. Yeah. And not only here at ABC News, because I have two sort of professional homes, ABC News, and then 10% happier, which is its own company growing. And there people really take meditation much more seriously. Although there are a lot of meditators here at ABC News,

the whole company at 10% happier is geared toward meditation. And so yeah, that tension and my style being raised in this ABC News, I've been here for 19 years. When I first got here, it was very hierarchical, sort of militaristic, tough, not very kind. It has really changed as much more collegial now than it's ever been, but that's in me. And I acted out sometimes with people who don't like it, especially in the 10% app here.

And so that marriage is something that's very much a dynamic tension in my life. Yeah, beautiful. I think it's a really important tension to recognize. And I think this to me is, you know, it's not an accident that workplaces all over the world have adopted emotional intelligence because they can see, I mean, the world is really changing, right?

The world, it wasn't that long ago when the militaristic sense, the, this, the, there was an assembly line and there still is in many places, what I think events, an assembly line mentality about work, that the underlying assumption is, you need to take the humanness out of people and just get them to do their job. Now, this may be true. You know, it's maybe true on the factory floor. Actually, I don't think it's even true there anymore that I think there's more and more evidence that the more we can bring in humanists, good, good communication skills, being more aligned with yourself and what you're doing is good for business, is good for work.

It isn't going to completely solve this innate tension that we're talking about, but it'll go a long way to making it a much healthier, more dynamic workplace. What do you mean by humanness? I feel like that could devolve into a bromide if we're not specific about it. I mean emotional intelligence. I mean understanding, you're basically, I mean self-awareness. Essentially self-awareness. Understanding, so you were just talking about, you have these particular proclivities that

you bring, it's partly, it sounds, and it's probably a combination of the training that you had before when the business was more militaristic. And it's probably I'm guessing just your own innate personality that that shows up not only at work, but in all parts of your life. And if you're lucky enough to be in relationship and if you're really lucky to me, I think the most advanced practice, if you really want to practice being relationship, and then, you know, and then have kids, and then you'll really find out

your own level of emotional intelligence. So really find out. As a brief aside, John Capitz and the legendary meditation teacher and author, when I had one Bianca and I had our first child four years ago, he said to me, the Dalai Lama just moved into your house. Yeah, yeah. So I think oddly enough, work can also be advanced practice. It can be a great place to learn about yourself and cultivate greater. I mean, it's good to be. I think it's really good to be in really difficult high-pressured

situations where there is this tension. How do you show up when you're running a company and you don't have money to pay payroll? How do you show up when you find out that the new product that you just launched is totally failing and you need to raise more investment money or any, you have a difficult boss. How do you deal with these? These are such rich things, such real rich things to deal with, as opposed to pretending that they don't exist, or to run away from them, or to feel like you're the victim of this difficult situation. So that's what I mean. In answer to your question, that's the humanness is noticing what our natural tendencies are, what our proclivities are, and then finding skillful ways to work with them.

All right, so I have a million questions, but I am most of them from a very selfish standpoint, that's like I want very therapy here, so check it out often, dude, and I reserve the right to to to to revert to that. But I think maybe the way to approach now that you've kind of set the table and the way you have the way to approach the rest of this conversation would be through the lens of your new book. So let's talk about what's the title, what's the conceit here? The title is Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, and the subtitle is Lessons from Google and to Zen Monastery kitchen. And when you say leader, I just want to point in on that, because

some people might think, well, I'm not the CEO of anything. So what, why do I don't need this book? Yes. So everyone's a leader. It's it again, it's a bridging word in that yes, of course, there are people who are in roles of leadership or have been or will be. So there are some particular skills and competencies that go with leadership. But I think of it as much broader in that leadership is essentially about influence. How do we influence other people? And we all influence other people.

Whether we're on a team, whether we're in a family. But there's a sense, again, leader implies a sense of the work world. So I think the focus of the book is about how to how to integrate mindfulness practice in our lives at work. And for most people, most people spend more time at work than any other part of their lives. I did say I wanted to dive into the book but in reading, in reciting your subtitle, I realized that I left out a key part of your biography which is Google. So you not only after business school started founding companies but then you, if I understand correctly, moved into really bringing these practices into major corporations. So can you just describe that part of your life and then I promise we'll get back to the book. Yes. Yes. So I

ran this this publishing company that I mentioned for 15 years and then I I started a executive coaching practice doing some consulting coaching and found myself working with some as a coach to several Google engineers and as a coach to several Google engineers. And it was right at the time when this Google engineer, named Meng, he had the idea of creating a program that brought mindfulness meditation into Google. And at the time I met him, he only had the name. The name he knew was kind of a joke called Search Inside Yourself.

And someone introduced him to me, saying that there was this guy who had, Meng used to introduce me as having 10,000 hours of meditation practice, an MBA, and started and ran several companies. And that's exactly who he was looking for to help develop this program inside of Google. So I found myself as part of an early team

of people creating, making up this program. And this challenge of how can you bring mindfulness, meditation, emotional intelligence, and teach Google engineers. And that was the challenge. Mang and I and a few other people started this program. And it became, it took a little while. It wasn't exactly an overnight success, but I'd say in year two or three, suddenly it had become more and more

Successful and we noticed that people were like they would announce that we were going to do one of these Programs at the time. It was a seven-week program and with Google Yeah, yeah, and literally within Seconds it would be sold out and there'd be waiting lists. And then there were waiting lists of hundreds. But so there was word of mouth that there was this program that you could learn to meditate and that you could get some of the basic skills about how to communicate better with the people on your team as a combination of well-being, productivity,

and leadership skills that we were teaching in this program. I wanna put, I just wanna say a few things to, first of all, another person on your team was Mirabai Bush, a fiber-calker, but she's a recent guest on this podcast of people wanna listen to Mirabai's perspective on all of this, you can go back a few episodes and hear that, and Meng himself has been a guest,

or really early guest on the show, so you can also listen to that. I also want to say, and I'm going to put a pin in this, and we'll come back to it. There's been some controversy around Meng himself, which I discussed with Meriboy, and we should talk about as well, because it does relate to workplace culture.

So we'll get back to that. But thank you for filling in the gaps on the Google, and I should, on the search inside yourself. It still exists if I understand not only within Google, but also working with other corporations. Yes, so in the year 2012, Meng and I decided it was time to bring this work outside of Google.

And we created an organization, a nonprofit called the Search and Siders Self Leadership Institute. I was the CEO, Meng was the chairman of the board, and off we went to work on how do we expand this work, and we were incredibly successful. Like right from day one, we had organizations, the timing, the timing couldn't have been better. So it was great timing in terms of mindfulness being more and more accepted and also having the credibility that this program was developed inside of Google didn't hurt at all either. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this.

Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Rue off course. In our series Rue Paul Born Naked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out

a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. All right, back to the book. Yes, promise. Yes. So the book. Yes. So, you know, one of the things that I wrote this book in part

because I felt that there was a lot of misunderstanding about what mindfulness was, that there was a lot of misunderstanding about what mindfulness was, that it was people were more and more skimming the surface when they talked about this thing called mindfulness. And then I thought there was even less understanding about the idea of this this integration of mindfulness in the workplace. And this had become my life. I've been doing this now for 30-something years. And I wrote the book as a way of addressing that issue. And what I realize now often people will ask me,

well, what do I mean by mindfulness? What's my definition? And I think that the seven practices that I talk about in the book are a pretty good way in to describing what I would say mindfulness practices. So mindfulness practice, love the work, do the work, don't be an expert, connect to your pain, connect to the pain of others, depend on others, and keep making it simpler. All right, let's walk through these.

Love the work. Yeah. So, love the work, unlike people often think that what it means is to love the particular job or role that you're doing, that's not what I'm saying. Yeah, a lot of us hate, well, I don't, but there are many, many people and I have compassion for them who are sucking jobs. The actual doing of the job, it's hard to love. Right. So the beauty of this practice is this is loving the work of meditation,

loving the work of mindfulness, loving, loving self-awareness, and loving, knowing yourself and going beyond yourself, loving that work, that work of self-discovery to fall in love with that as your real work and see that you can do that in any job, even a job you hate. You can still, in a way, it's actually very empowering when you take on the work of knowing more and more about your own proclivities and your own way of how you embody your own power, how you give away your power, how you feel like a victim, how you don't feel like a victim, all those, all those kind of human tendencies that we have to love that work.

How do we even begin to love start, you know, to gun to our heads, how do we start falling in love with this work that you're describing? I think I have a feeling, Dan, that you went, as you describe your first retreat that you did, that you kind of fell in love with this work. When did you say? I would, but it's hard to force yourself to do that. You can't force yourself to do that, right? But you can, but you can experience it. You can create the conditions where it's more likely for that. That's right. So I would say that, yeah, so do what you can to create the conditions to love the work, which might be from, you know, sitting a seven day retreat, like you did, or 10 day retreat, seven or seven, 10 day retreat, or a one day retreat, or just start sitting, just have a regular meditation practice

and read and spend time with, spend some time with maybe listen to awesome podcasts. Listen to awesome podcasts. That's right. And there's so many, listen to podcasts, listen to awesome Listen to podcasts, listen to awesome spiritual lectures that are around, or people who are involved in and doing this work. So this is the practice of loving the work. But then the second of the seven practices. I'm gonna stay on loving the work for a second. Because basically what you're describing is just you're encouraging what happened to you at age 21 at Rutgers you're basically saying Love the work of waking up we walk around and we're sleepwalking most of our lives We're on autopilot, and it is in my experience

infinitely Interesting to wake up out of that because you keep falling back asleep and so the waking and then you wake up to new levels of it and and over and over Learning how to actually be alive is an interesting job Exactly you got it right learning learning how to be alive How a part of loving the work you might you might if you want to replace love if if I've trouble with the word love You can say appreciate the work, like developing an appreciation for being alive, appreciating being alive, appreciating even the things that are difficult and ornary, and appreciating the difficulty that we have in our work. And somehow it's a small, it's a subtle, but major shift.

And now I'm in a different relationship with this job. Now this job that I'm not liking, I get to ask, what is it about? What is it? What am I doing? Is there something that I'm doing? What am I bringing to this situation? Now, there are toxic situations.

I don't wanna, you know, there are people who work in toxic situations and it's probably best to look for ways out of that. Mostly though, people, we all bring our own particular proclivities, our own habits, our own assumptions, deep, deep assumptions. Again, it's, you can get very psychological, very

spiritual, but this is the work. It's the work of understanding ourselves as human beings, appreciating. Yeah, and I would say based on my own experience, I was just talking to other people that seeing the difficult stuff, particularly about yourself, that is in some ways the delicacy, right? I don't mean like you need to do it delicately, but that is also true. I mean more like the most delicious part is the seeing,

you know, what a capacity to be a monster you have because it's when you see it that it no longer has such an opportunity to own you. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I get to see it all the time, right? So I'm, there's a joke amongst mindfulness teachers, how stressful it is to be a mindfulness teacher, right? Or how, you know, preparing, preparing to teach can be stressful. And how do you deal with that? I have my own, my own high standards, my own inner critic. And yet I'm, I'm really good. I'm really good at teaching

people how to quell, how to tamp and down your inner critic. And I know this is a strong and important skill to have. And yet it's something, you know, it's part of being human. So you, you beat yourself up still. I do. But what mostly? Oh, I would say about finding and feeling my own sense of power. The question for me, an ongoing question for me, is what is my real power and how do I express it? What do you mean by power in this context? So we're getting, yeah. What I mean by power, it might? So we're getting, yeah.

What I mean by power, it might skipping ahead to another, no, it's okay. It's okay. I'm determined to ruin everything. It's good, it's good, I love it, I love it. It's actually, it's funny. We are skipping ahead because this is my next book. I'm really interested in this subject of power.

And in fact, I just wrote a blog this week in which I tell the story of I was 26 years old, and one of my teachers at the Zen Center looked at me and said, Mark, you have a way of giving away your power or pissing away your power. I knew this wasn't a compliment. It's my my my my expenses and training. However, it was like, what power did she see in me that I was totally unaware of as a 2026 year old? Now, I've been studying power. Power basically is the ability to self-actualize, going back to that word, and the ability to influence in a positive way. I would say the positive power is to influence in a wholesome and positive way, to help people be more

themselves, to help people see more reality. We often, you know, we humans, we live in a, you know, one of the things I loved about two of the books that I've been recommending a lot lately, you've all know a Harari's books, sapiens and homodeas, partly because he sees the world through the lens of fiction, and he uses that language that we live so much in the world of fiction.

So, I would say power is living in the real world. Power is being able to see more reality and not being so caught by the stories that we tell ourselves. Most of us think of power, it's just being able to get other people to bend to our will. Yeah, this is the negative, this is the negative rep power has, but I think power has a very positive sense to that now, especially for people who are in positions who are in roles of power, this is getting back to what you were saying earlier about the militaristic way of work.

This is no longer cutting it, that now we have to find out how we can influence in a different way without bending people to do what we want them to. So when you beat yourself up about your own use of your power, what is that? What does that look like? It's for me, it's seeing the ways that I feel like I'm not completely trusting myself. I'm not completely aligned in my own sense of what it is I want to accomplish and what I'm doing. I think my own early training as a child was to feel like I'm the victim.

I grew up with a manic-depressive father, and I grew up in a place where, and of course it was never talked about, enough, everything was always fine in my childhood. It was everything was always fine. Anything that was difficult was always swept under the rug. And I think I learned great strategies for pushing away what was difficult or stressful. So part of my waking up back,

when I was in my early 20s, and this is part of my waking up today, is to turn toward what's difficult, just look at what's uncomfortable, to not pretend that it doesn't exist. So that's, I'd say, that's how I give away my power these days is by turning away from what's difficult. And what would that look like?

Oh, what would that look like? Oh, lots of ways. So like, here I am, you know, I'm in the, I'm, I'm thinking of how can I have the most influence and impact in my life right now? What does that look like? And so what that being fully empowered for me would be being completely comfortable in my own skin and not overshooting what's possible and not undershooting what's possible, and not undershooting what's possible to find. Where's the place, one of my questions for myself is, where can I have the most positive impact? How can I best use my own skills, my own abilities?

And the other question I have is, and what do I most love doing? What do I really enjoy? And then the third part of that for me is, and what sustains me financially? What does financial sustainability look like? So those are, to me, alignment and being in my own power looks like having the most positive impact I can have, loving what I'm doing and financial sustainability. And you find sometimes, because when you add in finance,

that's where the tension can come. You find that trying to do all of this, well, you pick on yourself a little bit about whether you're doing good enough job in this context. Yeah, in a way, I mean, I can see the decisions I'm making. Sometimes, maybe I'm, oh, I'm really loving this, but it's not really having as much impact as I wish it would and not financially sustainable. Or finding, oh, I'm doing this thing, this thing really pays well. But really am I, do I really want to be doing this particular role with this particular organization?

So yes, I'm somewhere between, I think the positive side would be assessing how I'm doing and the negative side would be beating myself up about it. Right. Well, I think we all walk that line. Most of us probably, well, I don't know. I'll just speak to myself for the, I think, I have an error on the side of beating myself up, but it's interesting when you talk about, essentially, you're talking about that you switch. When I was hearing, talking about power in a sense, to talking motivation and lead this that's what I heard. Yeah. And maybe it's I heard it just because it's something I think about a lot in my own life that I wish that as I or I aspire in my own life to think about what's my job on the planet for

my remaining time in the within the context of how can I help the most people? Is essentially what I heard you saying. With the third thing being remuneration and financial. But I find that there are other, that finance, if I'm being honest, looms larger, sometimes that I'm comfortable admitting. And also then there's this other thing around I ego and people coming up and saying hello to me in an airport or whatever. And that's a whole thing

in there too. And that's an interesting thing for me to navigate as I, that was what was coming up in my head as you spoke. Sure. Sure. I think from a societal perspective, often people are just asking the financial numeration question, right? That often drives what people do and then they wake up and find out that they're not so not very happy. This is pretty, pretty common experience. And not to, you know, not to downplay

that the financial numerous piece, it's a big one. It's not a small one, especially. And, you know, here I am in New York City and seeing, take some real money. If you want to live here, if you want to do things here. So, back to the book. Okay, so number two is, do the work.

Do the work. So, so first of all, I want to just say that the way these seven practices emerged was in the context of training a group of Google engineers how to be mindfulness teachers. And as we were looking about how we could spread and scale this work within Google, we decided we needed to train some Google employees to teach this work, and that would be one way to spread it. And this was the first time that we were doing one of these trainings. Actually, it was kind of a kind of a funny story in that I was sitting next to Meng was on one side of me in this room of a dozen Google engineers. And we brought in a man named Norman Fisher, who

is a leading Zen teacher and poet and writer. Yes, he's booked to be on this podcast soon. Excellent. Excellent. Norman's wonderful. So we invited Norman in to talk to the group. And as the meeting was starting, I looked at the agenda and the next thing that was supposed to happen right after we started the meeting was it said, Norman gives talk about mindfulness. And I had a pretty strong feeling no one had told this to Norman. So I just took the agenda and I put it in front of him. And he very not shallotly got out a piece of paper in a pen and took some notes and proceeded to give a talk about

these are the seven practices that he was recommending are most important to embody to value as a mindfulness teacher. And I thought these practices were just right on, were just perfect, not only as a mindfulness teacher, but I immediately thought, this is how I want to run my company. This is how I want to run the institute that I had started. And even brother in that, I thought, this is how I want to live my life according to these seven practices. So I wrote them down. I put them on everyone's desk. We had about 20 employees at the time. And I started reading, I started writing about them and talking

about these seven practices and a book started to emerge. And maybe a couple of years into that, I called Norman. And I said, Norman, I'm feeling a little funny now because a book is starting to emerge about these seven practices that you described at Google a couple of years ago. And Norman says, what seven practices? He literally had no idea what I was talking about. I read Norman the practices and he said, those are pretty good and good luck with your book. So that's where they came from.

So love the work. Then the second practice is do the work, which is that you actually need to have a daily meditation practice. So I like to break the work into two big buckets, dedicated practice and integrated practice. So dedicated practice is the practice you're doing when you step outside of the stream of your daily life, meditation, journal writing might be a dedicated practice, walking meditation. And then the other big bucket is integrated practice, which is when you get up from your cushion or when you stop writing, how are you bringing this work into your relationships, your work, all parts of your life?

So this is, do the work, is to have these practices. Third. Third. Don't be an expert. So there's an expression in Zen beginner's mind. I suspect that that's what you're saying here. I'm saying that. Yes. Yes. It's

the fact of out of the San Francisco Zen Center, the famous book Zen Mind Beginners Mind, where where Suzuki Rishi famously says, right, in the experts' mind, there are very few possibilities, right, in the in the beginners' mind. There are many possibilities. And I think, again, I like to clarify, of course, I want my surgeon and my car mechanic to be experts at what they do. However, I want them to have flexible enough minds to be able to be creative if something were to go wrong.

But beyond that, beginners mind or not being an expert is much more about relationships. None of us are experts. Anyone who tells you that they're an expert in their relationships, I would run the other way. And whether you are a leader or a team member or in any relationship, it's this human relationship thing, it really takes not being an expert. And there's no one who's an expert, I believe, when it comes to mindfulness and meditation.

Again, you want someone who has a lot of experience. It's good to have a lot of experience. I'm not getting any younger, Dan. I've been sitting pretty much every day for the last 45 years. And I still feel very much like a beginner when it comes to my meditation practice, my mindfulness practice,

certainly my relationship practice. My wife thinks it's hilarious that I'm teaching emotional intelligence, right? This guy. I feel like I've learned so much from my work roles that I've had. Starting with running a Zen monastery kitchen, I was then the director of this place

called Tassahara, CEO of Companies. It's just a great, incredible learning place about yourself. And again, this back to knowing yourself and going beyond yourself. So don't be an expert, core practice. Four. Connect to your own pain. Again, you're enough of a student of Buddhism that it's Buddhism 101. It starts, you know, the first of the four noble truths is life is hard. So it's essentially saying, don't push away what's difficult. Don't push away what's difficult. Don't push away what's difficult. In fact, connect to what's difficult on all levels.

Connect to what's difficult about things you're getting that you don't want, things you want that you're not getting. But then there's the bigger questions of if you're lucky, you're subject to old age, sickness and death. So it's recognizing that our lives are limited. It's recognizing that being a human being is just a tough gig. It's a tough gig. And it's part of our common humanity of seeing how that there are many, many difficulties in being human.

And this goes nicely into the next practice, which is connecting to the pain of others, which you could talk about. Again, if you're a research oriented, there's tremendous amount of research saying in the work world, the more responsibility we take on in work, the less empathy we demonstrate

that we connect less and less with the common humanity, with the pain of others. This has happened to me at times. And my mom really working on it. Yeah. How has it happened to you? That, well, I've talked about this in the podcast before. So some listeners were familiar with this, but about nine months ago, I had a 360 review, which is where you ask people who you work for,

who are your peers, people who work for you. And then in my case, also people in my personal life. So I call it a 360 bordering on a colonoscopy where 16 people give these anonymous hour-long interviews and then a report is written up and handed to me. And was very clear to me that I mean I knew some of this but I didn't know it as powerfully as as when I read it that I was I was and and I am although I've been working on it a lot overloaded and taken on too much as an ABC news anchor man and also with this growing company and giving speeches and writing books and it was making me Hard to be around yeah, it was also making me hard to be me

So I think those two things are inexorably inexorably connected So yeah, so I resonate with that yeah, and very common. I mean, I've had it I've also been through many, many of these 360s, these anonymous surveys, and it can be hard to collect the data to see the ways that the way we think about ourselves may be different than how others see us. I often say, I'll be working with leaders

who think that they are good listeners. If everyone around you says, you're not a good listener, you're not a good listener. Yep. So, connect to your pain and connect to the pain of others. Then the sixth practice is dependent on others, which again goes against... What I like, these practices go against the usual conventional grain you know where our culture is so much about independence and you know do it yourself. But so much we're talking about this a little bit earlier so much of the work world these days is about collaboration almost everything we do we're depending on others. So there's some studies that show that actually work has moved very powerfully toward project based collaborative projects. Yeah, I saw this paper, the study that came out of Harvard and it was like

collaboration is like the new word. I'm amazed, like I go in these days to corporations like Google or SAP. And you see just looking at who works there as people from so many different cultures, and it's so common that people are working in different cultures and different time zones and needing to get stuff done with other people who have incredibly different values and backgrounds.

And so amazing, the importance of depending on others, such a core practice. You know, there's a great article in the New York Times I read recently, and I think it's a couple years old. I think it was from the New York Times magazine. I'll try to put this, I'll try to remember to put this in the show notes about a study that was above big study that was done. I think the author of this article was the guy who wrote the power of Habitat Charles DuHig and he wrote and I think it was maybe an excerpt from his follow-on book. He wrote about the studies that were done at Google about what makes a successful team and I think it boiled

down to this concept of psychological safety, which means are you comfortable speaking up? Yeah. Yeah. This study is in that chapter, dependant others in my book. It's called Google Aristotle, in which they spent a good deal of resources and time and money and energy into coming to that conclusion. That it was also one of the things they found that there were norms in groups that there were Hard to identify assumptions in how people work together. So the one you're putting your finger on is that right people spoke at about the same amount of time No one no one took over a particular groups, right psychological Safety, yeah, one of the big left learnings for me in my 360 was I was not creating psychological safety

So I've been really attuned to that. Yes. And really hard, it's really hard to do. It takes it. So you can't, it has to be more than idea. You have to somehow embody a sense of, I think, of being more comfortable in your own skin, and then actually caring about these other humans beyond what their roles are. And again, there's always tension there because people at work do play a role. They do need to get stuff done,

but at the same time, they're human beings. So I know we're going to, we still have to get to seven, right? Yes, one more. But the, so one of the things I think about we're doing a lot of this work internally and 10% happier of a committee set up around diversity and inclusion, but it's also really veering heavily into our culture. And the idea of, you know, now we're going to resort to sort of platitudes here, but like allowing people to show, bring their whole cells to the office. And sometimes this can look, I can get a little to use a loaded word triggered by some of this because it can come off as pretty trickily. You know, I'm, you know, how we're going to start every meeting with everybody talking about how they're doing. And then it lapses into all these. You know, oh, I'm, how we're gonna start every meeting

with everybody talking about how they're doing and then it lapses into all these discussions about their personal lives, which actually, I really do deeply see the importance and power of this, but there's something stylistic about it. Like, can we do this without sounding like, I remember Beavis and Butthead, there's like a teacher and Beavis and Butthead, there's like a teacher and Beavis and Butthead

who's an aging hippie and it just sounds, he just sounds like hopelessly, Kumbaya, can we do this without laughing into that? It's something that's on my mind. Yeah. Yes, I think we can. And I think that, you know, it's interesting how, I was telling you, I think, even before we got started, that I feel completely schizophrenic in that I am really a business guy.

I love business. I have an MBA degree. And then I also am this, you know, this former Zen monk and a lifelong meditator. And I think that if we can become more and more comfortable with what looks like these two worlds, we can find skillful ways to walk what feels like that edge of where there is a focus on results, there is a focus on what needs to get done. But at the same time, we find ways, skillful ways to have people connect with, to find

ways that people can, you know, bring, maybe not their whole selves, but they can bring in themselves, they can show up as humans. We can do a little, even just a little bit of, you know, what are you, let's have a little bit of a conversation about what are some of your challenges, what are some things you're finding challenging in your life right now? Or I like, I like even, you know, starting a meeting with, you know, just for two minutes, what surprises you about your life right now, just to bring in a sense of that, we don't have to go right for the, you know, what's the strategic plan? What are we going to accomplish? That I've found

again and again, and this is one of the, I think, the real paradoxes of this world of whether it's mindfulness, meditation, emotional intelligence. It's actually good for productivity. It's really good. People are so much more productive when you allow them to face what's human, what's difficult, what they really care about. You know, I totally agree with that, but I guess my question is, can we talk about it in a way that had retained some irony? You know, we're not just barfing up our viscera all the time. We can do that, but we can also have a sense of humor, we can make fun of each other, and it doesn't become precious.

I think the sense of humor part and the lack of preciousness is a really key thing. I think it takes being really comfortable with the way that you're presenting it and what it is you're trying to accomplish. But sense of humor is that should be, you know, that should be practice number eight. All right. Well, what's seven? Seven is keep making it simpler, which in a sense, I would say that in order to make it simpler, having a sense of humor about things, simplifies things, having a sense of what's really important, what really matters. To have a different relationship with what our problems are and to keep, but I think core practice is coming back to what really matters, what's most important, and also to be careful of the religion of busyness that is such a core

part of life here and not only in the United States, but all over the world. One of the stories I tell in this chapter is I'm just getting, this was when I was CEO of the Search and Sider Self Leadership Institute. I'm getting on to a Skype meeting with a man and a woman who we were talking another from another company. And as soon as they came on, the woman looks at me and she says, are you as busy as we are? And I said, I thought to myself, I can take, I can kind of take a risk here and maybe a little bit of sense of humor and I said, no, we don't do busy here. And, and I could see, you know, she looked at me down. Oh, this is good. They're not done. They're not just going to blow me off here with my trying to have a teaching moment.

But there is something about recognizing that busyness just makes things more complicated. And there's something about being focused engaged and even spacious, even practicing a sense that when we notice that we're tight, when we notice that we're stressed in the middle of a work day, just to take a breath and just to practice for a moment, a moment of spaciousness in the middle of a busy day. But how do you busyness? A lot of us don't have a choice. And we've got bosses breathing down our neck. We've got kids at home. There's a lot of pressure on us. There's a lot of pressure. And one of the things that I've noticed, I work with a lot of executives who have trouble turning it off, right? When they go home, it's still like they're at work and they can't actually be with their kids. I think this is really a problem and something that

be with their kids. I think this is really a problem and something that meditation practice and developing some practices and habits to be able to turn it off even for a few seconds in the middle of a busy day, but certainly during those core transitions. So when you're getting in your driveway or walking in your door of your house to have a practice and a habit of taking a couple breaths and letting it go and allowing yourself to fully now it's time to be home now. It's time to either just take care of me Take care of the people I live with be with my be with my family or even if it's even if you live by yourself There's nothing very healthy about being on all the time. Turn it off. Turn it off as a way to reduce some of the busyness. And it's

challenging. Again, going back to, there is that tension about caring for people and getting stuff done is a really interesting core tension the tension about self-care spaciousness and and stress there's there's tension. There's not like oh I'm gonna be spacious all the time. That's not that's not gonna happen But I don't want to be I I don't wanna be stressed and tight and going full tilt all the time either. I wanna be able to pay attention to my energy. I wanna be able to notice when I'm feeling stressed,

when I'm going really hard, and be able to say, you know, I'm gonna take a minute here just to relax, check in, notice my own body, my own breath, and then get back to work. There's no silver bullet here, but it's about navigating, seeing clearly that this tension exists and doing your best to achieve some sort of equipoids. Yes. And having, and I think where these practices play such a great role, So part of it is loving, loving the work of noticing, of noticing

when I'm aligned and when I'm not aligned. Even if it's not aligned, not aligned, not like, okay, I'm still, I'm noticing. This is, this is a little bit like following your breath, you know, thought, thought, thought in meditation. It's the practice of remembering the practice of noticing, not falling asleep. So two questions in closing. As promised, I do think it's the practice of remembering the practice of noticing, not falling asleep. So two questions in closing. As promised, I do think it's worth talking a little bit about, we've invoked the name Mang a bunch.

So he has been some controversy around him. Can you just tell us what that was and what your thoughts are about that given that you have a long relationship with him, but also that we're talking about how to show up at work. Yeah. I actually know very little because I had already left the organization. All that I really know is that I think that the search inside yourself board asked him to step down as the chairman of the board. And I think that there were some, there had been some accusations that he had made some people uncomfortable when he was an engineer at Google. That's, I don't know. Not at Search Inside yourself, more old.

Previous, old. Yes. And these had to do, when my understanding was he made people uncomfortable in a sort of, it was gendered. It was, yes. That's, again, that my understanding was he made people uncomfortable in a sort of, it was gendered. It was, yes. That's, again, that's about what I know. But what does this tell you about, because this is a big part of how we show up at work

and we're in the Me Too era now, which I think is a very important thing, and what kind of lessons can we take away from this? And Me Too, by the way, has swept through the Buddhist and meditation world in a big way. Former guests on the show have really gotten caught up in it. I think being human, being human is really hard. Being a woman, being in the body of a woman, being in the body of a woman, being in the body of a man, the some of the assumptions

that we have about how we treat each other are now, I think, very importantly being re-examined, re-examined, especially, you know, I mean, I've been at, you know, business conferences where they were about people being awake and alive, and over and over again, there'd be mostly men behaving badly. And it used to be kind of mind blowing to me, and at the same time, there's a lot that we need to learn for ourselves. And I think there's, I think men have a lot of work to do to in terms of appreciating supporting men and women. I agree.

Final question is, and I call this kind of facetiously the plug zone. So just can you just plug everything? You can start with a new book, but I call this kind of facetiously the plug zone. So just can you just plug everything you can start with a new book, but I you've written other books and anything else you want us to know about social media, et cetera, et cetera. I can plug right seven practices of a mindful leader. And my my my website is mark lesser ma rc le ss er dot net. I've written three other books. The book that I that has done the best of mind is a book called less. The subtitle is accomplishing more by doing less and at the moment I'm out there doing trainings workshops keynote talks

training, workshops, keynote talks, coaching, that's what I'm doing now until until the next company I can feel in me like I like starting things I like taking ideas and making them into things and I'm I mentioned that to my wife and her eyebrows go up and you know like really you're gonna start another company like I think I think I might have to. So we'll see. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, big thanks to Mark Lesser. Time now for your voice mails. Here's number one. Hi, Dan. My name is Chris. I got to say a lot of work a couple of months into meditating and I can already see a big benefit. But in any case, it's my question. Okay, first one is, what is your take on seeking out a person

for meditation or a type of practice and in-person practice versus what they're using your app or any other app, and by the way, I love your app. What is your take on actually being with someone one-on-one is a benefit to that versus the app? I'm sure other listeners may have that thought as well. Secondly, how many of these guys that things weigh too much and welcome to the club? I'm sure.

And before I start meditating, sometimes about two or three minutes in those thoughts, prior thoughts, before sitting and meditating kind of creep its way into the meditation, what are your thoughts on taking two, three minutes just to write down and just do a mental dump on a piece of paper just to get it out. Or is wrestling through that process beneficial to the meditation exercise, if you will. And I guess that's pretty much it. I'm curious to your thoughts. I appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Two questions there. I think the first one I've talked about before,

so I'll keep that one quick and get to the second one. The first one I had to do with the value of in-person meditation teaching as opposed to, I don't know, reading a book or you said you use the app. I think in-person is great and incredibly powerful. The only reason to build apps, as far as I can tell, is that most people either don't have access to a great meditation teacher, don't have the time to go sit in a class. If you live in a city where there's a meditation center and you're attracted to go to the way they teach and to go sit there and Learn from the teacher. I think that's a fantastic way to do it. I think that's the optimal way to do it Do I think that can coexist with a practice that you're doing on your own either?

You know just doing self-guided meditation or using an app whether it be ours or some of the other excellent apps that are out there, yeah, absolutely. But for sure, there is immense value to sitting with a great meditation teacher. And in my own practice, I do all of those things. I do meditation on my own. I use guided meditations on the 10% happier app. And I have the enormous privilege of being able to talk to Joseph Goldstein one-on-one. So go for it, go for it if you've got the option.

The second question had to do with the fact that you're kind of beating yourself up for thinking a lot during meditation. I think you know what I'm gonna say to that, which is don't, I mean I do it, so I'm a huge hypocrite, but try not to beat yourself up for thank you too much during meditation because that is the human situation where, you know, we're thinking a lot and that's not going to stop.

So you asked whether it would make sense because you're finding that the stuff that you're thinking about as you head into meditation often shows up in meditation, which by the way I find zero percent surprising, and I don't mean that in any way a dismissive way I mean it to encourage you. I think it's totally fine that that's happening. But you asked whether it would make sense to, and I think your phrase was to do like a mental dump of your of all the thoughts on a piece of paper before you sit to meditate. I never done that, but I can't see why it would hurt. Try it. Try it out. See if it that, but I can't see why it would hurt. Try it.

Try it out, see if it works. And then call me back and let me know. But I wouldn't be surprised that even if you did that, those same thoughts came rushing back in in meditation. But I can guarantee you if those thoughts don't come rushing back into meditation, some other thoughts will come rushing back in. And then it's time to do the job of meditation, which is to notice that you're distracted from

your breath or whatever it is you're focusing on in your meditation. Notice that some thinking is happening. Blow at a kiss, make a mental note of, wow, I'm thinking, uh, or this is anxiety or this is fear or anger. Uh, and then go back to the object of your meditation, breath or, or whatever, over and over and over again. That the, the moment you notice, I know you've heard me say this a million times, but you can't hear it enough. I can't hear enough. So I'm saying it for myself too. The moment you notice you become distracted, that is not a failure. That's a victory. It's a victory. We got to reframe this whole thing. It's a victory when

you notice you become distracted and you should pat yourself on the back and go back to the breath and what or whatever it is you're meditating on. And why is it a victory? And again, I know I've said this a million times, but can't help it. It's a victory because when you notice that you have this crazy, tumultuous inner life that this, the voice in your head and you're all of your unseen urges and impulses and they can't own you in the way that they have for all of your life. And that's massive. All right. Sounds like your practice is going well from my semi-educated perch.

Thank you for the call, I appreciate it. Let's go to voice mail number two. Hey, Dan, my name is Brett. Thanks so much for everything you do. Really love the show. Calling you from New York City, I am probably like many of your listeners, sort of a classic career person who's recently gotten into mindfulness. And my question is, what lies in between the 10 minutes a day

that a lot of us are probably trying to carve out and appreciating, which is great, and things like your app are wonderful. But what lies in between that and sort of enlightenment, which I don't think is really in the cards for me, but are there sort of levels or gradations of expertise kind of on that journey and that progression, or is it just like, you know, every day, hopefully it helps you a little bit and you should appreciate that. So that's really my question. It's kind of is there sort of something to look forward to over the course of years or is it just kind of you know whatever you get out of it in that day.

So thanks very much. Appreciate it. I think there's an enormous amount to look forward to, no matter what your dosage is, whether you're doing just 10 minutes a day or whether over time you gradually increase that or decrease it. This is a skill, working with your mind, exploring your mind, not being so yanked around by whatever your ego is coughing up. This is a skill and you just, you get better over time. It doesn't necessarily happen in an unbroken upward line. It can be a wavy, bumpy line, but overall, in my experience,

and the experience that the people I know, the trajectory heads in the right direction. And, you know, I'm stuck, as I've said before, with math jokes for the rest of my life because I wrote a book called 10% Happier. But I, you know, believe that 10% like any good investment compounds annually. And you will notice that your ability to focus and your ability to self-regulate gets better over time.

And that's just immensely valuable. Is enlightenment in the cards? Look, I don't know. I can't make any claims about an experience I have not personally had. I find it incredibly interesting. And to talk to Joseph Goldstein, who, again, is my meditation teacher, and who, by the way, is going to be on this podcast very soon. So Joseph has told me that many of the people he's seen experience some of the earlier stages of enlightenment because again in Joseph's school of meditation it's a kind of four-stage process that these are to use his term regular Joe's people who just made the decision to commit to doing

long retreats over time so you know I don't know that you're gonna get there from 10 minutes of meditation a day. And by the way, I still don't even know if there's a quote unquote there, there anyway. So, but I'm not sure that it's accessible for, you know, on a dosage of 10 minutes a day, but I think a lot is, and that is just gradual improvement over the time, over time,

getting becoming a better, happier, comer human being. Joseph speaking of Joseph, my colleague Samuel Johns, who's one of the ACE producers on the show, sent me a list of questions that when people start worrying about the state of their practice, Joseph has a list of questions that you can ask yourself that will give you a sense of, are you making progress, is this thing worth it? So there are 10 questions. I'll just

read them to you. One is, are you less immediately reactive to difficult or stressful situations, both in meditation and in life? Two, over time, are you generally becoming aware of the wandering mind more quickly in the sitting? Three, in daily life, the feeling of rushing is a good feedback that we're ahead of ourselves, not being settled back in our bodies. Do you find that you're rushing less often or becoming aware of it more quickly? This, by the way, is just a huge thing for me.

I notice, because I'm over-scheduled that I'm rushing all the time, and it's very powerful just to notice the rushing. My first incident is often to beat myself up for it, but then pretty quickly I'm like, oh, no, no, the good news is you noticed it. And then actually, maybe take a breath and then for a nanosecond or two, you're not rushing.

And then it's like, it begins again. Here's the question, here's number four from Joseph. Is there more awareness with your speech, perhaps refraining a little more frequently from angry or judgmental speech? Still working on that personally. Five, is there a little more openness in being with other people more willing to listen? Six, are you becoming a little more familiar with the qualities of common concentration in the practice?

Seven, are you using the tool of mental noting? Is it becoming a little more continuous, at least for periods of time? Is the tone of the note becoming softer? Just in case you're new to the show, mental noting is just the technique of using a soft, mental note, when you notice you've been distracted, you might notice, you might just say anger, anger in the mind, a little whisper in the mind. That's a skillful use of thinking to orient you toward your direct experience. So you can use that in your formal practice

or when you're in the middle of a conversation with somebody who's really annoying you and notice anger is arising. You might make a little mental note in your mind and then you're less likely to say something that you regret perhaps. Here's question number eight. Is make a little mental note in your mind, and then you're less likely to say something that you regret, perhaps. Here's question number eight, is there a little more ease in being with whatever arises in your meditation practice, simply noting it for what it is?

Nine, is it a little easier to sit longer? Ten, are you becoming somewhat more aware of the changing nature of all experience and holding onto things a little less. So just back to your question about what is there between 10 minutes a day and enlightenment. I just want to double down on my unhesitating answer that there's a ton there in my experience. And I think those questions can illuminate the vastness of what's on offer here. And the worthiness of this work. Why we love Joseph. Thank you so much for your questions. I really appreciate it. Keep in coming. The number is in the show notes. You can call and ask anything. We really, we really love those those questions. I want to thank

the producers of the show, the aforementioned Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, and the ace Ryan Kessler, who I'm looking at through a glass right now on a late in the evening, and I'm keeping them from this family, so I should shut up soon. Thank you again for listening. I'll see you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members.

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