By Mike Brcic,
Chief Explorer, Wayfinders

This is the 5th post in my [ALIGNED] series, with tips, tools and wisdom to help you build an Aligned Company (resilient, self-managing, and purpose-driven) and Aligned Life (lived in line with your values, purpose and ideals).

If you’re here for the first time, I encourage you to Visit the Table of Contents to see all of the posts in the series, or start with the Introduction.

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“Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance.”
-Morgan Freeman

Stillness: An Entrepreneurial Superpower

It took me a long time to embrace the power of stillness.

Like most entrepreneurs, I feel into the trap of busyness: unless I was going flat-out, pedal to the metal, and getting s@#$ done with my business, I didn’t feel productive. I raised money, hired lots of staff, expanded all over the world, and just kept going and going.

Back then, stillness to me would have equated directly with laziness. ‘Who has time for sitting still,’ I thought, ‘there’s important shit to be done!’

I kept on going and going until, inevitably, I burned out and faced a great reckoning as things started to quickly fall apart in my life and in my business.

Over the last 2 years, however, I’ve come to embrace stillness; I recognize it not only as a great tool for personal calm, but also as an incredible entrepreneurial superpower.

Embracing stillness - as a tool for combating stress, for creativity, for aligned leadership and more - will make you a much more effective entrepreneur. It will take you from being a ‘doing’ leader - one that is constantly doing and working - to a ‘leading’ leader, .

A ‘leading’ leader spends little of his/her time doing the busywork of the business, relying on the team for that work. He/she instead spends his/her time:

Creating an inspiring vision of the future (both for the company and the world it will help create).
Developing the strategy that will move the company toward that vision.
Aligning a team around executing on the strategy.
Listening: to customers, to the market, to the winds of change, in order to make adjustments to the strategy.

All of this is greatly aided and abetted by creating space for stillness.

In many traditional societies around the world, the healers, chiefs, shamans and leaders of the community regularly take time away from the community to immerse themselves in the natural world and simply listen: listen to the rhythms of the natural world; listen to their quietest inner voices; listen to their own heartbeat.

This time away from community and in stillness is a crucial component of their leadership; it is an opportunity to take time for visioning, away from distractions and sitting in a place of connectedness, and bring learning and wisdom back to the community.

Stillness can take many shapes and forms, some of which I’ll outline below, but first I want to outline why I think stillness is such a superpower for entrepreneurs and why it’s so valuable.

5 reasons why stillness is crucial to entrepreneurs

I could go on and on about the myriad reasons why stillness is so crucial for being an effective (and fulfilled) entrepreneur, but for the purposes of relative brevity I’ll outline five here:

1. Stillness reduces stress and builds resiliency.

When things started going poorly for my previous company, I thought the answer was to double down and work harder. “I’ll hustle my way out of this mess,” I thought.

Being in non-stop Energizer-bunny mode felt like the right response to a crisis for me: I was going to work my way out through sheer will.

The harder I worked, however, the more stressed I became. I spent most of my waking minutes implementing different of strategies, trying out all kinds of approaches, and encouraging my team to hustle harder.

This only made me more and more stressed. I’m certain my stress and anxiety rubbed off on my team as well.

Taking a break - especially when things get intense - is crucial for your mental and emotional wellbeing and your stress levels. A stressed-out entrepreneur is an ineffective entrepreneur.

I don’t generally get stressed out with my new business Wayfinders. I’ve been careful not to make the same mistakes that led to the crises in my past business. But if/when things get stressful, I take that as a sign that something is out of alignment, and rather than working my way out of the situation I take time for stillness and reflection; usually the way out becomes known to me shortly thereafter.

2. Stillness helps you align and connect with yourself.

Making time for stillness is an opportunity to pause and reflect on what is important to you. Often I will guide my moments of stillness with a question or two (or more):

“Am I on the right path?”

“What feels important to me today?”

“What have I been missing?”

When I ask these questions and enter my stillness with a bit of intention, that stillness creates a space for answers to emerge that align with my deepest and most authentic self.

When I have some answers to my most important questions and have taken time to connect with myself, that makes my decision process much easier, while leads to point #3.

3. Stillness enables better decision-making.

During my reckoning, I made many poor decisions as a result of the constant doing and constant stress, with no breaks to pause and reflect. I was at the bottom of a hole and instead of figuring out how to build a ladder, I just kept digging and digging.

Since selling that company and starting Wayfinders, I’ve approached the business - and my life - very differently.

I rarely work more than 30 hours/week (usually 15-20), I focus my work time on where I can create the most value for the business and for my customers, and I regularly create time for stillness.

That process of pausing and reflecting has opened me up to an entirely new way of making decisions that are generally guided by intuition.

I’m a firm believer that our subconscious minds have access to a deep well of information that dwarfs the information our conscious minds have access to. When we create time for stillness we give licence to our subconscious minds to fire up and start creating: connections, ideas, strategies, and more.

When I allow my deeper, subconscious self to guide my decision-making, I generally end up making better decisions: ones that are aligned with my values and ideals, and ones that take a bigger, more long-term approach to strategy than the more expedient, stress-driven decisions that my conscious brain defaults to.

4. Stillness helps you innovate and generate ideas.

Studies have shown that true creativity rarely emerges in forced ‘brainstorming’ sessions. I’ve rarely been able to schedule ‘creativity time’ (aka brainstorming), whether on my own or with others, and then sit down and will good ideas to arise. It just doesn’t work that way.

What does work, however, is making time to quiet my mind.

The Ideas Meditation

**This can become an integral part of your workday**

Often (usually 1x/week) I will lie down in my bed with a journal and pen by my side and headphones on (I highly recommend the album Flow State by Above And Beyond for facilitating meditative states).

When the chatter of everyday life dies away and I sink into my meditative state, creativity often gushes forth like a wellspring and when it does, I write down anything interesting that comes up in my journal.

Often, in a typical 1-hour lie-down/meditation session I’ll have a dozen or more ideas spring up. Sometimes these are business ideas, sometimes they’re ideas for my personal life, sometimes they’re a thought about a person I haven’t thought of in a while.

What has worked tremendously well for me has been to carve out this ‘lying down’ time at least once a week: I schedule an hour for a lying down meditation (with my journal at my side) and an hour afterwards in order to pursue some of these ideas further.

I’ve found that if I go straight from my meditation into follow-up mode, I don’t give my inner critic time to shoot down my ideas, a process that is inevitable if you give your inner critic too much free reign with an idea.

The follow-up can look like a phone call to an old friend, a bit of initial research on an idea, or calling a customer to get feedback on my idea. The important thing for me has been to do it right away after my meditation.

Give it a try, I promise it’ll be worth your while.

5. Stillness changes your relationship with time.

When you are constantly in doing, to-do list mode, you’ll always feel like there isn’t enough time in the day. There will always be another thing to get done, another project to start, another goal to achieve.

**Time is not necessarily what you think it is**

When you create time for stillness, you learn to ease into the flow of life; you realize that very little of what you deem urgent is actually urgent; your relationship with the clock changes.

If you’re used to being in constant hustle mode, taking an hour out of your day in the middle of the day may seem like sacrilege and initially inspire panic in your brain. After you do it a couple of times, however, you’ll discover that after a ‘time-out’, your business is still running, the world is still turning, and time away from your business can actually be quite valuable.

Do it enough times and your relationship with time itself will change and you’ll learn to see time as your ally instead of your enemy.

6. Stillness makes you a better leader.

A calm leader inspires calm in his/her team. When you inspire calm and encourage stillness in your team, they benefit for all the same reasons listed above.

When you are more calm, you are more empathetic. You become a better listener. You realize that taking the time to, for instance, have a real conversation with an employee isn’t a waste of time but is rather an incredibly effective use of your precious time.

The best leaders are those that create time to reflect and assess rather than blindly doing and hustling. As the saying goes, ‘Don’t climb the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning on the wrong building.”

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4 Ways to CREate and Support Stillness In Your Life

I’ve outlined some of the reasons why stillness is so important for being an effective and aligned entrepreneur. But how do we cultivate stillness in our lives? Here are a few of my favourite tactics/strategies:

Meditation

This is, of course, an obvious path to stillness. Meditation is by its very nature a practice of stillness.

The point of meditation is not, however, to quiet the mind and shut down your thoughts - a common misconception about meditation.

Meditation is simply a process for becoming more observant of your thought processes. The more you practice, the more you are able to observe your habitual thought patterns and understand them. The more you meditate, the more you are able to use that practice of observing when you are ‘off the mat’ i.e. during the rest of your life when you are not meditating.

Understanding how your brain works and its habitual patterns makes you a much more effective entrepreneur: you learn about your destructive mental patterns as well as your productive ones.

From improved memory to better focus, there are many business benefits to meditation (here are a few celebs and CEOs who swear by it).

The important thing with meditation - more so than length of your meditations or the quality - is to establish a consistent practice. Even if it’s just 5 minutes a day, doing it consistently will bring significant benefits.

If you’re new to meditation, try starting with a meditation app like Calm or Insight Timer.

NOTE: After being inspired by the monks of Bhutan during last November’s Wayfinders event, I started a 30-day meditation challenge in December of 2019. It was simple: meditate 30 minutes/day for 30 days straight. A number of people joined me and we created a WhatsApp group for accountability and support. We’ve done the challenge every other month and just started a new challenge on June 01 - come join us!

2. Journaling/Writing

I’m obviously a big fan of writing and I write regularly (both in this blog and for my own personal use) as a way of capturing my thoughts and as a process of stillness.

Writing is, for me, an opportunity to put everything else on pause and spend time alone with my thoughts and emotions and capture what is important to me.

Whether it’s using a formal journal such as the Five-Minute Journal or just writing a few daily sentences or pages in a journal or on your device, journaling/writing is a wonderful means of embracing and encouraging stillness in your life.

I use an app called 1 Second Everyday (1SE) as both my journal and a memory bank: it’s a simple app that encourages you every day to post a photo or video of your day, along with a space to jot down some thoughts.

The ‘Inspire Me’ function in 1SE incorporates a bonus prompt such as ‘List ways you could have made today better.’ or ‘Where did you go today?’, or ‘Who is someone you miss that you haven’t spoken to in a while?’ I don’t always use it but when I do, I always enjoy the process of contemplation and the answers that come up.

3. Unstructured Quiet Time

Stillness doesn’t need to involve something as structured as meditating or journaling; there is huge value in simply stepping away from the busyness of our lives and not doing anything obviously ‘productive’.

This could be reading, painting, playing a game with your kids, playing Sudoko, or whatever to you constitutes a break from the usual busywork of the day.

This often is most impactful when it takes place during your work day, as a break or segue from your regular work.

4. Spend time in the natural world.

From the benefits of forest bathing to cleaner air, there are myriad benefits to spending time in nature. There are many studies that show how nature benefits your brain and body, such as reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones.

I live in downtown Toronto so nature isn’t easily accessible, but ‘nature’ doesn’t need to mean a wilderness canoe trip in the Yukon. I’m blessed to have one of the best urban mountain bike networks in North America 20 minutes away, so as of late I’ve been riding at least once a week for several hours. The impact on my mood and wellbeing is tangible.

Even a walk at the park up the street inspires and recharges me, so I regularly make time to get to the park as well.

Whatever your definition of ‘nature’, take time to enjoy it on a regular basis!

5. Block off time for stillness.

Rather than waiting for the right time for stillness, or just randomly taking time for stillness, I schedule stillness time in my calendar. Even if it’s just 20 minutes/day, having it in my calendar and then honouring that time by actually seeking stillness means that it becomes a regular habit - which is especially important when I’m really busy (for many of the reasons listed above).

As the saying goes, ‘Meditate 20 minutes a day, unless you’re really busy… in which case you should meditate an hour a day’.

Some closing words on stillness

I hope I’ve given you something to reflect on and reasons for slowing down and creating stillness in your schedule. I’ll repeat it again: stillness is an entrepreneurial superpower.

Without it, you’ll continually find yourself playing catch-up and there will never be enough time to get everything done; with enough of it in your life, you’ll discover more calm, you’ll be more effective and less stressed, and you’ll have less of a panicked relationship with time.

So… how about you? Are you creating time for stillness in your life? Are you inspired to try some of these suggestions? I’d love to hear your experience in the comments below.

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