#26 - Mindfulness in Your Life - Part 4 - Meditation

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

meditation, thoughts, day, unpredictability, started, disruption, life, trisha, podcast, brain, entrepreneur, planned, minutes, meditating, schedule, de stress, business, tools, feeling, desk

SPEAKERS

Trisha Barita

00:02

Hey there, I'm Trisha Barita. I'm a mother of twin girls, a wife, an entrepreneur, a psychology major, a lawyer, and a coach. With all these different roles in my life, in the past, I truly struggled with limiting beliefs in my ability to adequately juggle all these roles successfully, I often would be frustrated that time and again, I let my goals and dreams always take a backseat to everything else I was trying to do. And those dreams always seem to be on the horizon, just out of reach, until I discovered tools and thought work to help me tackle and learn to balance all of it. Now, I don't let these titles define my limits. I define my balance in life, by how I choose to show up for myself, every day. Am I perfect? Hell no far from it. But I do work every day to believe in myself, and to be present with whatever I experienced in this life, The Good, the Bad, and The really fucking ugly. to own my truth and own my thoughts. I created this podcast to talk about how that noise gets in the way of our goals as women. And now I help women and teach them tools to cut the overwhelm of noise in their life, preventing them from getting the balance they want. If you liked this podcast and want to take my free course to get started on designing your balance, and saying fuck that noise, go to Trisha barita.com, forward slash free course. Now let's get after it.

02:07

Hello, fabulous friends, I am pumped about our topic today. This is the fourth podcast in a series called mindfulness and your life that I did over the last couple of months. And the other episodes are mindfulness in your life Part One journaling, part two thought downloads and part three nature. So if you want to go check those out, they're kind of along the same lines were a dive deep and particular topic about mindfulness. Now, I'm always talking about it in this podcast, but these particular episodes are very focused. So of course today is mindfulness and your life part for meditation. Now, whether you just decided to try meditation, or maybe you're just here because you're curious, or you've been meditating for years, there's always room for growth, I think around meditation, new ways to use meditation, different ways to do meditation, which is why I love the idea of using it to de stress at your desk. When you're a busy working professional woman, I'm going to start out with telling you how I ended up in meditating. Because believe me, as an attorney in the employment and business law world, the offices that I have worked in, in my life, were a far cry from some of the more expanded thoughts on mental health and distressing in the corporate workplace. I mean, there was no ping pong tables or massages available video game arcades, or time set aside for you to focus on gym and yoga. offices are like, pretty focused generally, about work. And ironically, lawyers are some of the most stressed out people you know, so and I think, being one that they could all use a little destress at the desk. So, so the idea of meditation, it was never really in the forefront of my mind when I began my professional career, especially in those beginning years of this, you know, somewhat heavily stressful profession. And then adding on becoming a business owner, CEO and entrepreneur, you know, of my own business at some point is another whole layer of different kinds of stress. So, as an entrepreneur, and as a professional woman, you know, my workday would often have unpredictable parts to it. And so this all kind of has has is what led me eventually to seek out different things and meditation sort of was piqued my curiosity. So let me just tell you, of course, many of us Have unpredictable work days. But I mean, I would read these books and they'd be like, block your time. And I would create schedules and I would block my time. But there aren't evitable II things in the type of work that I do that come up that add a layer of strain to the other parts of my schedule. In fact, before it worked on, actually, you know, my thoughts around this, through specific tools, and in scheduling differently, I would find this very stressful, you know, but the reality is unpredictability in my daily schedule has been, and to some extent, will always exist to be some part of my professional life. I'm approaching almost 20 years as an attorney, and the next couple years, and I've been an entrepreneur for about a decade, and unpredictability has existed throughout all of that, as it has with the growth of my coaching and teaching business. So there's not much to do about controlling some of that, because people call me and they need my help on an urgent matter, or the court requires me to be somewhere or my business has an IT issue that is like a cog in the wheel that must be addressed. Immediately, you know, to fix things, so, you know, some things are cleanable, and some things are not. And as a professional, and as an entrepreneur, I've learned that there will always be fires that need to be put out somewhere that I did not know where burning when I started the day, early in my career, when I first started experiencing this, this strange realization that the day can be planned, but that in order to be successful, I needed to be adaptable to the unplanned, I experienced stress around those situations, it was a you know, and it wasn't the call from the courthouse to be in front of a judge or the CPA meeting something for accounting purposes that day, or maybe a networking event that I volunteered for, for to do work with taking longer than expected, or even the phone call, you know, with it fixing or taking however much time to try to fix something and needing my assistance with that. It wasn't those actual things, okay, that that were really the stress, it was my thoughts about those things, and how I had not planned any of those things. Maybe in my day, the thought that led to the frustration, feeling of fueling my frustration. And now I can't do the things I had planned. And even though it was doing perfectly acceptable things for my work in business, I couldn't help have thoughts that now I was somehow being unproductive, because the day I had planned when differently, then then what I had predicted. So with that thought I would find myself feeling all kinds of frustration, frustration with myself. And even with my work when in all reality. As I explained, this is part of the type of professional work that I do. And it has and always will be this level of unpredictability do it. So if so, is there something wrong with me that this unpredictability was giving me these feelings of frustration? You know, should I just change my job and circumstance to feel better? Or should I just tell myself, you know, in those moments that I should get over it, because this is part of work? Look, the answer is not changing the job, although many of us would like to change the job in those moments. Because you think if I change the job, I won't have this, I won't have this feeling of frustration, and how do I end up feeling of frustration? It's, it's more about changing how you approach how you think about the job. If you resonate with this at all, you may be like, what, how do we do that? And especially since I just went over how annoying and frustrating it is, you know when when things disrupt your schedule, and add to you know, stress and otherwise planned parts of your day or week? Well, first of all, there's no reason to get mad at your brain for having thoughts that it is lame when your schedule that you beautifully cultivated, is upended. Your brain is a beautiful, complicated thing that likes predictability. And so unpredictability is often something that will cause it to completely flip out. It's like your brain goes back to its primal nature of survival and tells you this is no good. We should stick to the schedule. What are you doing? And of course, you're like, No, we have to do these other things right. And you're, you know, then it can be like a time I've learned your brain throwing a tantrum of thoughts about the change in your day. But there's multiple ways to approach your thoughts about this. And, and I won't go through all of them today, but for this one episode, I want to talk about how a little bit of disruption to those to the toddler in the brain tantrum have thoughts that this is disrupting your day and you feel unproductive in some ways, or you have those feelings of frustration, thoughts, you know, surrounding, you know, how the day didn't go the way that you had plan, I think a little bit of disruption can be good to stop the sort of train of thoughts that can come from this. And that's what I've found to be something useful for me and something useful for my coaching clients. So and this is what leads me into the meditation piece. So a bit of disruption, meaning something sort of to break up and bring some calm to your day. And this is what I like to do through like a five minute meditation, the de stress at your desk, that I keep mentioning, now, obviously, when you're putting out fires and handling a disruption to your schedule, you may be thinking, Trisha, why would I give five minutes away to meditation? Well, let me tell you this, I didn't believe it would be worth it either. So I think, you know, you have to take a step back and realize that, you know, a lot of people have a lot of different thoughts about what meditation is, how it can be useful, you know, whether it's useful. And I think I really break them up into two schools of thought with meditation, one, you seek it out as a, you know, another tool in your box of mindfulness tools. And you may be a regular meditator. And you often use this as a space to connect with being present with yourself. And in the moment, especially when, when you have a series of other thoughts, you're trying to now disconnect from that and get more connected to, you know, what's going on with you.

12:07

I think if that's you, I love it, you know, I can think of so many ways, and so many people that I know that have used meditation to change their lives. And more more more ways than one, you know, expanded even past the five minute meditation to huge meditation retreats, and, and really using it in so many different ways. But here today, I'm talking about like how to use it in this sort of somewhat stressful situation where you have maybe a disruption in the day, or you just need that, you know, break in your day to kind of refresh your thoughts. So that's one school of thought people that have already kind of leaned into this have already started to embrace it and have already started using it or have already gained a major interest in using it. Then there's the other school of thought you think you may think it's some kind of headspace potential hippie bullshit that you don't have time for? So I actually was in the latter category. That's right. Look, my parents, my family that I come from, they don't meditate. All right. They never talked to me about meditating. So this concept of meditation really wasn't something that was introduced throughout my life. And then, of course, when I started my career, it wasn't something that was talked about in the workplace, as a young attorney, so I, I did not find meditation is something I was looking for. I always thought is the sort of far away thing that was not really something I needed or even wanted. But let me tell you, a good friend of mine, who was also an entrepreneur told me that she was using it to start her mornings off, and she found that she liked it. At the time, she was telling me this. I had been focusing on developing my morning routine to develop a calmer approach to my day. And I thought, well, maybe I should just try this, right. And so I started five minutes a day, a couple times a week, and for the first month or so it was not, it was not easy to be present. In those five minutes, I was actually shocked to find that my brain was like, oh, we should think about this or what about that and that you have these things to do. It was like telling me, hey, don't forget that you need to do this work. And I was like, feeling like I need to like write things down or pull myself away. I really just didn't realize how active my brain was, until I started to try to incorporate meditation. It's like don't remember you have that work thing. Or maybe you should be taking care of this issue for your kids or don't forget, you need to call that person or make schedule that appointment, you know, etc, etc. And brain and your brain is like that, right? Like it's just like, Ooh, you should do all these things. Now that you know, you're stopping for a second here. But but eventually and fairly soon. and into the process, I want to say in the first two months, I really started to look forward to it. And I thought, Man, if I get these five minutes, I just feel so much better, I really started to be able to, like, get my brain to just chill, and like, embrace it. And I started with guided meditation, which is what I encourage everyone that I know that starting into meditation or, and I still like guided meditation, that's my preferred meditation. And that's when someone's sort of guiding you through the process of what to think about. Also want to add that, you know, even if you aren't having like a crazy schedule disruption, like I'm talking about, you can use this five minutes just to calm the chatter in the middle of your day, it can really be amazing, but so women CEOs and other successful professional business women experience anxiety, depression, poor sleeping habits, you know, weight changes, and other health concerns. And even though they're high achieving goal oriented individuals, they often experience thoughts that they should be doing more, and are not doing things perfectly as they have planned. And while meditation can solve all of those issues, it has some clear benefits that can pause the day's stress to, you know, de stress at your desk, and gain that calm, you may need to approach the rest of your day in a more productive and peaceful way. I was looking at this, and even the Mayo Clinic even talked about how meditation, you know, may clear away the information overload that you can build up in your day in your head for whatever reason. And I've explained, my reason for starting meditation was to create a beginning calm to my routine in my day, but as soon as I started to experience the benefits, I started figuring out how to incorporate it, when I had those moments in the middle of the day where there was maybe a disruption. And after I you know, put out whatever fires I needed, but I was frustrated about how, you know, the time was gonna get away from me, especially as a young mom, this was something that came up because now I, you know, I couldn't just work late, like I maybe would have done before, or, you know, I have things or plans to do something, right. And so, I that time, you know, was a thing that I would get very frustrated about by losing because of, you know, the unpredictability of the rest of the parts of the day. Anyway, this meditation, I started using it, and lo and behold, it was a gaming this sort of clean way to restart the day for me to have this Oh, okay moment. And it really changed how I approached the rest of the day, instead of being staying the rest today with that frustration feeling. And these, you know, cycle of thoughts, it ended up doing the opposite and giving me sort of that fresh restart that I would get sometimes in the morning when I meditated. So and I think you can get that benefit just by using it for five minutes. So and, you know, one of the a couple of the benefits that Mayo Clinic talks about that you may experience from meditation also is that, and this is one thing, you know, that I definitely experienced was that provides you that different perspective on a stressful situation, it may increase self awareness may reduce negative emotions, it may increase your imagination and creativity, I've definitely felt that before, where I know that I have to do something very creative in the afternoon, I have to deal with a complicated legal problem. Or maybe I have to, you know, you know, determine about how I'm going to, you know, write some marketing materials or create a program or teaching program, and I need some extra imagination and creativity, the meditation can for me can reset that and give me that opportunity. I'm kind of a morning person. So getting that in the afternoon is is really important to me, if I need it, it may, it may meditation may also increase patience and tolerance. And who doesn't need a little more of that I had two seven year old girl twins. So I need all the patients and dollars. So usually when they they aren't quite seeing eye to eye with each other. So I always want to be extra patient with teaching them how to communicate with each other. Anyway, and we becoming becoming beautiful young women. So it may also give other health benefits and improve sleep quality. And these are just a few. And there's multiple types of meditation. As I said, I started with a guided meditation. And if this is something that can benefit you, I definitely want you to start training it like today. If you're interested, don't wait. Don't say you know what, I'll get to that Sunday. Try it out. And if you already meditate, super awesome. That's amazing. And I think it's such a cool tool to have in your toolbox. But I did for anyone that doesn't have a five minute meditation and get started, I have one for you to download. You can get this immediately. This is I'm putting this on here for all my podcast listeners, go to the show notes for this episode WW dot Trisha barita.com forward slash podcast Ford slash 26. And get get that five minute audio meditation so you can start trying it out. And you won't just get the audio meditation, you'll also get the guide on how to de stress at the desk. It's just some quick tip guide on some ideas on how to create that space from the meditation. So now, for those of you that have been listening for a while this podcast, you know, some of my podcasts, other podcasts have these little like free, free downloads, free quick tip guides, I love to put those out every once in a while and especially to find a podcast listeners. So don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, or Google or whatever platform you're you're listening to this podcast on. So you don't miss an episode because and get one, you know, one of these quick tip guides if I put them out there. And, you know, I hope you I hope you try this meditation out as soon as you can. Because I think that once you start to give yourself an opportunity to get the benefits of meditation, if you're interested, which I'm assuming because you're listening this podcast, you or at least curious or you've been doing

21:35

and try to really feel you know that connection to be able to create the calm and your day that you've been looking for create that sort of de stress at the desk moment for you. All right, as a final takeaway, I do think that this is again, just one tool in the toolbox of designing your balance. And I know it may not be for everyone. But you know what if it gives you that break in the workday that you need, you know, in your journey of seeking balance in your life, the more open you are to trying all the tools will leave you with a rich knowledge of what works for you. And remember, as you encounter different challenges in your life, you know, you may not totally be loving meditation right now. But you can always reach back in the toolbox and say, You know what, I'm gonna grab that five minute audio meditation and use that and just see how that makes me feel because of what's going on with me right now. So I say, hey, grab it, give it a go. Who knows? If you aren't already a meditator and distressing at your desk on the regular or wherever you work. You just might become a headspace loving hippie into their daily meditation like I become, and I'll leave you with that. No, go get after it. You got this

23:06

Hey, thanks for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, and are a woman ready to say fuck that noise, so you can start designing the balance in your life. Go take my free course to get started at Trisha barita.com forward slash free course. Now Have an awesome day and I'll see you next week.