Taking Quiet Time

Audio Clip:

Above is a verbal guide.

The key thing is that whatever technique you choose you should do it alone. It is hard to develop intuitive benefit from group meditation when there are so many competing thoughts in a room. Thoughts are real things, energy packets if you will, and when they collide, they cause destructive interference and flatline. I recommend at least one meditation session a day done alone.

Magical solutions appear to us when we are not trying to find them. That means that the sessions in between working periods in our 5-hour day become as vital as the work sessions. That is why I schedule at least one walk, again alone, a day. There are certain places near my home that I know I can walk to in 10 minutes and be completely alone. The way I think about it is that my meditation session is the ping out from my sonar and when the solution pops into my head when I am walking through a wood or park or on a beach it is the universe pinging back.

The challenge in business is that we tend to underestimate the importance of those breaks from work. We will let a meeting run over, or convince ourselves to do just one more thing before we take a break. That thinking is fatal to your success. You have to treat the off-work sessions as importantly as you do the on-work sessions.

Highly developed intuition is a “secret weapon,” says Judith Orloff, MD, professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of Dr. Judith Orloff’s Guide to Intuitive Healing. “It gives you all kinds of information you wouldn’t normally have. This isn’t the brain analyzing; this is nonlinear knowledge. It’s a second kind of intelligence. You want to use both… at least get off by yourself for a few moments. Take a walk” Orloff says she herself does this when she wants to engage her own intuition. “I need to be separate from other people and tune in,” she explains.

For three decades I have made a study of ‘women’s intuition,’ and I have developed tools that have helped me harness more of the power of my own intuition. It is still a wonderful and mysterious thing, but the tools I offer throughout this course are guaranteed to increase the connection between your brain and intuition, an essential process for success in business.

The human brain contains approximately a hundred billion neurons. It’s possible your brain has more neural connections than there are stars in the universe! Neurons in your cerebellum can have one million connections each. The average person fires more neurons in a day than all the cell phone connections on the planet. Your brain is alive and ever changing with neurons disengaging and engaging in new neural networks constantly.

We develop neural networks two ways. When we learn something new, we utilize what we already know to understand better the thing we do not know. Our brain reaches for the familiar. Using the law of association, your brain fires new neural connections to create understanding.

The law of association is a law of psychology that is based on the teachings of Aristotle. Neurons that did not previously connect now do and a new neural network forms. If we do the same thing repeatedly, it becomes familiar, unconscious, and effortless. When you learn something new and repeat it in your mind, you are actually creating a neural network based on the Law of Repetition, another psychology law. When we build neural networks, a substance called Neural Growth Factor (NGF) actually “hard wires” the neurons together. Significantly, if an old neural network is not working properly, it may lose the NGF holding it together.

When we consciously change a neural network through hypnosis or another intervention such as meditation, we break down the existing NGF and re-wire the network to new ways of thinking. (Rewire Your Brain; Think Your Way to a Better Life, by John B Arden, Ph.D.)

Intuition is a real thing. Bill Gates trusts his. Steve Jobs believed it was “more powerful than intellect.” Warren Buffett only makes decisions based on it. Richard Branson ‘prefers it to stats and data.’ Albert Einstein called it the “only real valuable thing.” In a study where thirty-six major CEOs were asked to name their decision making’s most critical component, 85% responded with “intuition” or “gut feel.”

Dr. Daryl Bem Cornell University’s physicist turned psychologist oversaw a 1,000 participant, decade-long series of experiments. Dr. Bem showed that humans do indeed have the ability to “sense” the future outcome. So, how strong are his findings? Because of the paradigm shifting implications, he waited until his intuition studies had reached a “74 billion to 1” statistical certainty before releasing the results. By anyone’s standards that is statistically significant.

Dr. Bem told Cornell News “It violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don’t know about them.”

According to a University of Iowa researchers, the brain’s so called “axis of intuition” is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is what we see in cartoons of superheroes or spiritual gurus. It is a power emanating from the middle of the forehead. If you want to have winning ideas you need to be more intuitive. Upgrading your ventromedial prefrontal cortex is the key and the way to fire it up is through simple meditation (something Gates, Jobs, Buffet et al also enjoy)

A 2014 Wake Forest University study (Zeidan et al) looked at the brains of 15 volunteers before and after just four days of mindfulness training. What did they find? In addition to a host of other wonderful brain enhancements, the freshly minted meditators seriously increased their ventromedial “activity” and “interconnectivity.” Thankfully, whether you believe in intuition or not, meditation can change your brain to create winning ideas and make better decisions. Every good idea I ever had in business or life came shortly after a session of meditation.

Let’s just take a moment to clear up the nonsense that is often spoken about meditation. Meditation is simply a group word like sports. It covers hundreds of different practices and techniques just as the word sports covers everything from cheer-leading to darts. So, when someone says they meditate they really don’t understand what they are doing and even more so when someone offers to teach meditation. We can’t teach sports, we can only teach a sport.

Each technique, just like each different format of sports aims for a unique purpose or outcome. The technique I offer is just one form of meditation, and it is purely intended to increase the frequency of great ideas.

This taking quiet time technique has three parts to it. First is relaxation, second is finding stillness, and third is mental imagery. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. It requires no skill or experience, and there are no advanced levels. The technique, or versions of it, can be found in most other spiritual and mental practices, but because those activities have a different intention the technique gets absorbed and produces a different result. Think of those practices, such as yoga, as a baked cake. In yoga or any other discipline, there are many ingredients, added in a certain order and baked a particular way to achieve a delicious, airy sponge. With taking quiet time, what we are doing is taking a couple of the same ingredients and using them differently to get a result that is as different in texture and taste as an omelet is to a cupcake.

Be careful not to confuse quietness with silence. Silence is hard to achieve. Sound is the brain’s interpretation of the vibrating cilia in the ear in response to airwaves. Unless you remove all air from your environment and within your body, you cannot find silence. So, don’t try. Emotions are also a form of noise. By quietness, I mean a sense of calm or stillness. Stillness, like the still of the night, is a calm, motionless existence, devoid of thought or emotion. It is emptiness. It is close to nothingness, and the closer we get to that, the closer we get to all of our potential and the more ideas we will have.

In life, you get infrequent reminders of what this stillness feels like. It is that nanosecond of magic when a baby’s hand closes around your extended finger or the sense of infinity as the sun slips below the horizon or knowing eyes briefly connect with you across a crowded room. You barely notice yourselves disappear in those times, but you do.

The insanity I prescribe is that taking quiet time needs to become a daily habit, and it requires you not to switch on the computer, radio, television, or cell phone first. It is contrary to how we have learned to behave in this time and place. Taking quiet time becomes the number one business growth tool in your arsenal, and the aim is to make it one of the first things you do every day. Here is the technique I recommend: (A verbal guide is available in downloadable resources)

1. Alone

Taking quiet time must be a technique you practice alone. You might currently enjoy meditating with a friend, partner, or group, but with this second step you must be alone. We are aiming to return to the nothingness of the newborn individual, and that requires you to separate from the powerful energy of other people’s thoughts and intentions. You would never think of having both radio and television volumes on at the same time in the same room. It would sound chaotic and probably irritating. With taking quiet times, thought energies would mingle and cause destructive interference. Solitude is essential.

2. Early in the day

Because our days are filled with sensory input right up until we fall asleep at night, this process is best undertaken early after waking. Where and when possible, it should be among the first things we do after waking. Quietness is only achievable while our minds are not yet fully awake, and we can tap into the inherent stillness of the dawn hours. To emphasize the importance of timing, we need to digress a moment to consider how men and women think differently.

Men tend to process thought in a linear way, taking one thing at a time. Our brains are like clipboards with a list of items and check-boxes. When we complete one task, we tick the box and move on to the next. Hence, taking quiet time first thing in the morning gives it the necessary priority and guarantees it gets done. Do it, check it off. Move on.

Women have the capacity to multitask mentally. All in the same moment, they can be thinking about what to wear, what to put in the kids’ lunch boxes, how much milk is left in the fridge, how they should approach the issue of a raise with their boss, whether to ask the neighbors over for dinner on Friday night, what would be the best time and menu, and what did their husband really mean by that comment last night in bed. (I, of course, had completely forgotten I made the comment, and never meant anything by it in the first place, but that explanation will never make her thought go away.) Therefore, if a woman tries to take quiet time at any time other than early in the morning, it will be harder for her to shut the left side of the brain down.

If you can find alone time and space where you live, then no matter what time you get up now, set the alarm clock to wake you thirty minutes earlier. If you live in a busy household, you should strive to be the first person up or else the distractions will destroy the process. Sounds are not so much an issue as the emotions they carry. Quietness requires emotionless contemplation.

Of course, reality is not so straightforward. There are other things we might do after waking, and this is not intended to be a military discipline. You may have valid reasons you can’t get up half an hour before anyone else wakes or steal away to a private place. The imperatives are that you take quiet time alone and as early in the day as you can manage.

3. Silent, comfortable space

Choose as silent a place as you can find, one away from as many interrupting sounds as possible. There are always distracting sounds including internal ones, so don’t stress about it. The hum of electricity is almost always in the air, and our stomachs might growl for breakfast. That does not matter. Wherever that place is for you, try to make it comfortable so you look forward to being there every morning. A comfy chair in a quiet corner, with a towel or blanket to keep you warm, is sufficient. Think minimalist here. A chair, a cushion, or a sofa in a corner of a room is fine. If you have a room with a window that looks out onto something natural like a tree, you are golden.

Most people today, however, find switching off even for twenty minutes a day is a tougher task than it should be. The Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University in Utah performed studies about how the brain processes information, which were reported in the Denver Post in 2011. Their research has found, that as the flow of information increases, activity increases in the region of the brain responsible for decisions, solutions and control of emotions, but only up to a point. When the brain is flooded with too much information, activity in the same region suddenly drops off. The center for smart thinking shuts down at a time when you probably need it the most. This has implications for the way we live our lives today. People admit to an almost compulsive need to answer emails, texts, twitters, and voice messages, and get nervous when their own do not receive immediate responses. The study showed that people find it impossible to take time off in our culture anymore without being anxious the whole time and with minds racing. It shows why it is difficult for people to simply sit down and do nothing. They concluded that “only when people take the time to free both sides of the brain, to forget about to-do-lists and to unplug from all input, solutions often percolate up from the subconscious. History is filled with stories like this. A period of not thinking about the problem, then the answer simply appears.” The ideas that percolate when we simply stop thinking are not small everyday flashes that fade as quickly as they come, but complex, detailed maps that make our stomachs flutter with excitement.

4. Sitting

Sit comfortably. Don’t lie down because at that time in the morning, it is too easy to fall back to sleep. A little extra sleep cannot harm, but we are aiming to achieve something powerful here. It sounds like an oxymoron, but we need to focus on nothing. For that, we need to be awake enough to control our thoughts. It doesn’t matter how you position your legs so long as you are comfortable. It is what we do with our mind that counts, so all we aim for with the body is to get it relaxed and comfortable so it does not interrupt us for the next twenty minutes with aches and pains. I like to place my hands touching together in my lap. Feet can be apart but resting in contact with the floor. It is simply a relaxed sitting position.

5. Relaxation

Your eyes can be open or closed, but I find closed easier for concentration. Take a deep breath. As you exhale, do so with a sigh. Making a sound here helps concentration, and it feels good. Repeat a few times until you feel nicely relaxed. Now, sit as still as you can. Breathe normally, and let your mind become aware of your body in the chair. Take your concentration to your feet, legs, torso, head, and arms like a probe. Tell each part of your body to relax. Imagine your face and head, your spine, your heart, and your stomach relaxing. You start to feel as limp as a rag-doll. It is a good feeling. Keep the quietness.

6. Connect with the ground

Once you feel more relaxed, it helps to imagine yourself connected to the Earth. This is another Native American technique that allows your mind to be more fully in the present. It reduces some of the chatter in your head. Simply spend a few seconds taking your awareness down to your feet. Imagine roots growing from the soles of your feet and down through the floor, through the walls, into the foundation, down into the soil, and farther down toward the Earth’s core. Don’t spend too much time trying to get the image perfect. Just a few seconds of imagining those roots connecting with the Earth has a very useful grounding benefit.

7. Follow the breath

When you feel relaxed, it is time to distract your left brain. The goal is to think of nothing. This is unnatural. Focus on your normal breathing—in and out. Just as you did when committing to change, follow it with your imagination as it goes in through the nose, curling into the lungs, and back out. Keep stillness. Try to do nothing but follow the breathing. Counting in and out is fine. This time, we are not going for deep breaths. Breathe normally. Follow the air with your concentration. Do this for around ten to twenty minutes. You don’t need to keep formal time. Your mind will tell you when it has recharged sufficiently. If you are like most people, you follow your breath a few times, and then suddenly realize that your mind has drifted back to some everyday thought. Don’t fret. That is your ego, indignant about being set aside. It happens to everyone. Just smile and refocus on your breath. Get stillness back. Taking quiet time works in ways we don’t need to understand, so just enjoy this wonderful personal time.

8. Stretch

Open your eyes. Smile. Stretch. Thank yourself for this gift of a few minutes’ peace. You deserve it. You just took 2 percent of your day for you. Do it every day. In Step Three, we will add an image exercise to do immediately after stretching. For now, just enjoy the benefit of taking quiet time.

This rewiring of the brain is vital.

Ray Dalio , personal worth $14 billion: “42 years ago the Beatles inspired me to meditate 20 minutes a day. Now I feel like a ninja in a fight,” Dalio said. “When it (market changes) comes at you, it seems like slow motion.”

William H. Gross. $2 billion ”my best ideas come after I do nothing 20 minutes a day.”

Daniel Loeb. $4billion dedicated practitioner that raises every day at 5:30 “All my best ideas come from meditation.”

The following benefits are guaranteed:

Improved Brain Functioning

Human Physiology 25 (1999) 171-180; Psychophysiology 31 Abstract (1994) S67; Psychophysiology 27 Supplement (1990) 4A; Psychophysiology 26 (1989) 529; Psychosomatic Medicine 46: (1984) 267–276.

Increased Flexibility of Brain Functioning

Biological Psychology, 55 (2000): 41-55; Psychophysiology 14 (1977): 293–296.

Increased Efficiency of Information Transfer in the Brain

Motivation, Motor and Sensory Processes of the Brain, Progress in Brain Research 54 (1980): 447–453; International Journal of Neuroscience 10 (1980): 165–170; Psychophysiology 26 (1989): 529.

Improved Perception

Perceptual and Motor Skills 49 (1979): 270; Perceptual and Motor Skills 64 (1987): 1003–1012.

Improved Problem-Solving Ability

Personality and Individual Differences 12 (1991): 1105–1116; Dissertation Abstracts International 38(7): 3372B–3373B, 1978.

Increased Resistance to Distraction and Social Pressure

Perceptual and Motor Skills 39 (1974): 1031–1034; Perceptual and Motor Skills 65 (1987): 613–614; Perceptual and Motor Skills 59 (1984): 999-1000; Dissertation Abstracts International 38(7) (1978): 3372B–3373B.

Increased Intelligence

Intelligence 29/5 (2001): 419-440; Journal of Personality and Individual Differences 12 (1991): 1105–1116; Perceptual and Motor Skills 62 (1986): 731–738; College Student Journal 15 (1981): 140–146; Journal of Clinical Psychology 42 (1986): 161–164.

Increased Creativity

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989) 950-964; The Journal of Creative Behavior 19 (1985) 270-275; Dissertation Abstracts International 38(7): 3372B–3373B, 1978.

Increased Self-Confidence and Self-Actualization

Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 6 (1991): 189–247; Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 286–341; British Journal of Psychology 73 (1982) 57-68; College Student Journal 15 (1981): 140–146; Journal of Counseling Psychology 20 (1973): 565-566.

Improved Verbal and Analytical Thinking

The Journal of Creative Behavior 13 (1979): 169–180; The Journal of Creative Behavior 19 (1985): 270–275; Perceptual and Motor Skills 62 (1986): 731–738.

And now a walk in the woods!

The question now is what to do with your newly rewired neural networks. Like any wires, they are simply potential until you plug them into an energy source. To get those great ideas you are looking for you need to plug the network into a powerful and beneficial source.

Expanding Connectivity

Another character trait that jumped out at me from the pages of the biographies of self-made men and women was their affiliation with nature. All of them turned to nature in times of stress or when big decisions needed to be made.Henry Ford was passionate about walking in the country and reconnecting to nature. He encouraged workers to exercise in their off-hours and believed that next to work, it was a man’s duty to think. For his thinking time, he retreated to an old farmhouse near the Ford dairy in Dearborn. He sat on the ground when it was dry and in an old rocking chair when it was wet and simply let thoughts come to him. He shared his philosophy with Ralph Waldo Trine in a 1920s book titled Power That Wins. He offered this dictum: “Let every man think for himself. Let him call a conference for his powers, his common sense in the chair, his desire and knowledge of things as they are pleading the case before him.”Emerson was another who attributed his success, and his sense of tranquility through it, to being at one with nature. He spent as much time walking in a forest as working in an office because that is where he found his inspiration.

. . of Nature itself upon the soul; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors; the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry; a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.
— Ralph Emerson

To channel his restlessness, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mother paid him to clear and plant an eight-acre field. In that solitude, he came up with the ideas that made him a billionaire. John Jacob Astor, son of a German butcher, arrived in New York as a penniless immigrant. He became enchanted by the American wilderness and, within a year, was up the Hudson River making a living in the fur trade. In his biography, it is claimed that he imagined his future while daydreaming in the cool shadows of American oaks.As I read more biographies, I noted the emphasis successful people placed on connecting to nature. George Washington Carver was a famous American scientist, educator, and inventor, best known for changing the direction of the American agricultural industry. He was born into slavery and all eleven of his siblings died at young ages. When slavery was abolished, black people were not allowed to go to the public schools. These barriers did not prevent George Carver from educating himself. He went on to be an advisor to three American Presidents and to promote racial harmony. His quote best describes the benefit of rewiring our network into nature at every opportunity: I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we only will tune in.Early civilizations referred to Mother Earth as a matrix. They perceived people, animals, the earth, and the universe as unified, and achieved a symbiotic interconnection. That is the genuine matrix, and we need to plug our new neurons into it. We were, indeed, much closer to Mother Earth once, and making small, subtle attempts to get closer to her will enhance the benefits of Taking Quiet Time, because by plugging into nature’s matrix, your brain can access an expanded reservoir of knowledge just as a single computer can plug into the World Wide WebScience tends to agree:Miyazaki and Juyoung ”Leisurely forest walks, compared with urban walks, yield a 12.4 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol.Humans concentrate better after spending time in nature: U of MichiganUniversity of Kansas and Utah found that after three days of hiking and camping in the wilderness, participants improved test scores by 50 percent,”Soil on your skin boosts serotonin: U of BristolGardening and other outdoor activities influenced the behavior of more than four hundred kids nationally, aged five to eighteen, diagnosed with ADHD: U of ChicagoQing Li from the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo found that time spent outdoors boosts immune systemJust after writing this section, a visitor to my blog (http://trevorgblake.com/forum) wrote:I’ve been practicing TQT for a few months now. My businesses had both shown large losses in the first quarter of this year, but now after a record breaking 2 months, I ran a report, and both companies are already 15% ahead of our highest year to date. I didn’t do anything different, it was just as if I was attracting all the right clients. Not only that, the ideas that have been coming to me are incredible and are being implemented for the fall. Two nights ago, I had a unique solution to a business project that was challenging me. I’ve also met a few very important people that are aligned with my intentions for the business, and these connections are a dream come true.I could not hope for a better or more word-perfect testimonial to the benefits of taking quiet time than that. This rewiring of the brain is vital. The new neural networks have none of the old learned patterns of behavior, nor the limiting beliefs that have stopped you from creating a winning idea before now. It will bring to you moments of insight that have you smacking your forehead with the palm of your hand and wondering why you have never thought of that before. Those insights can come immediately, or when you least expect them later in the day or days ahead.When I started my first company, the remedy to fix the problem that had made me mad came to me in a flash. I had done this exercise exactly as prescribed above every day for a couple of weeks. I had lots of ideas that sparked in my mind, and I was careful to jot every one of them down. Then one day I took quiet time just before checking out of a hotel room.An hour later I was walking through a busy airport terminal when the solution to the problem came to me. It was not a vague idea or a notion, but a blueprint. It felt like a moment of genius. The whole business model that could work to get those patients their medicine and make a profitable business out of it seemed to roll out in front of me as if someone had drawn a diagram on the floor. I actually stopped walking and let out a laugh that had other travellers thinking I had flipped out.For my second company idea, I was driving shortly after taking quiet time. I had to pull over and start writing feverishly on Post-it notes. When I had it all written down I drove toward my appointment again, but I could not get the idea to go away. I turned the car around, drove home and immediately set about turning the idea into a real company.

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