This article was last updated on December 30, 2015
Success is an experience that many—if not all—of us want to experience in our lifetimes. We each have different reasons—growth, happiness, recognition, wealth, or advancement—that motivate our ambitions to succeed.
And out of all the self-help and personal transformation books I’ve read, there is one simple and powerful secret—that I’ve found so far—for boosting success that the majority of the world tends to overlook: daily meditation.
Countless entrepreneurs, high-achievers, and world renowned celebrities make it a point include meditation in their busy schedules and reap the benefits of it. Research and studies about the many benefits of meditation for getting ahead are all over the web.
It’s one of the world’s greatest secrets for high achievement. Though it tends to get overlooked by the mainstream world because of misconceptions, daily meditation and its many benefits can make an incredible difference to your career.
5 Reasons Why Meditation Will Make You More Successful
Anxiety-relief and Stress-release
If you want to be successful, anxiety and stress are not your friends.
Stress and anxiety can hurt your ability to concentrate on your work, communicate with colleagues, manage your workload, and earn advancement up the ranks of your organization. Because you can’t effectively take on you’re the challenges, problems, and obstacles of your career, if you’re too busy stressing out and worrying about them.
A WebMD article about anxiety by Dulce Zamora describes “Anxiety At Work” as “A Career-Busting Condition” that has the potential to ruin your career.
So if you’re looking to climb your way to greatness, anxiety and stress are the last emotions you want on your mind.
The good news is there is a simple, powerful, and effective way to make that career-ruining anxiety and stress disappear within a matter of minutes: daily meditation.
Meditation has long been known as a proven solution for creating anxiety-release, stress-release, deep relaxation, tranquility and serenity. No matter what is going on in your life—no matter how much stress and agitation are taking a toll on you—sitting in the calmness of meditation can always bring you back to a state of pure peace.
When you have access to this peace on a daily basis, you’re going to feel unstoppable. No matter how many setbacks, problems, challenges, and defeats you face, it’s going to feel like nothing can faze you. Because even when everything is falling apart and your plans seem to be just collapsing in your face, you’ll be able to step back into that oasis of pure peace, serenity, and tranquility.
And when you step back out of it, you’ll be ready to take on the world again.
Increase your happiness
Contrary to popular belief, happiness creates success—not the other way around. Happiness is the foundation and the fuel for high achievement, top performance, and success—not the other way around.
Shawn Achor is a TED speaker, Positive Psychologist, and former Harvard professor who published a book called The Happiness Advantage in 2010. In his book, Achor demonstrates with research that happiness is the human brain’s highest potential for top performance.
So as opposed to popular belief, finding happiness first is the best way to become successful. According to Achor, meditation is one of the best steps we can take on a daily basis to improve our happiness.
Sitting in the stillness of meditation can boost your success by making you feel happier on a daily basis. It’s a simple, effective, and convenient way to tap into that happy, motivated, and positive state of mind that you need to succeed.
And when happiness is your normal—when sitting in the stillness everyday anchors you in a consistent feeling of fulfillment—you’re going to operate at your highest potential. You’re going to operate at one hundred percent. You’ll be in that happy, optimistic, positive, and motivated state of mind that you need to perform at your best.
Enhance your focus
In today’s world, there are huge numbers of ways to distract yourself—internet, social media, mobile apps, television, and video games—that seem to multiply more and more each year. As important as it is, staying focused and zoned in at work—especially if it’s a job that you don’t feel any passion for—gets more and more difficult as time goes by.
The thought process is: why work when I can check my emails, chat with friends on Facebook, connect with people Instagram, browse through my Snapchats, or swipe for people on Tinder? In today’s world, we constantly feel distracted by the hottest websites, mobile apps, or mobile devices.
Staying focused is harder than ever. With the demands of the corporate nine-to-five grind, staying focused is also more important than ever.
So if you’re looking to kick aside those distractions to improve your focus and concentration at work, there isn’t a better way to do it than daily meditation.
A Psychology Today article titled “Brain Scans Show How Meditation Improves Mental Focus,” Joshua Gowin cites a study where meditators demonstrated improved mental focus and cognitive performance compared to non-meditators.
A USA Today article titled “Meditation can keep you more focused at work, study says” by Anita Bruzzese highlights similar research where workers who took up meditation felt increases in attention span, concentration, ability to focus on the task at hand.
And if you spend time searching through Google, you’ll find that there’s plenty of positive research out there on the benefits of meditation for improving focus, attention span, and your ability to concentrate.
Daily meditation can send you on your way to success because as a meditator, you’re not going to be constantly checking your phone or aimlessly looking at your emails as often when you’re at work. You’ll have a better attention span and a deeper ability to focus. And you’ll be more successful because of it.
Give you clarity
Meditation also offers you the ability to step back and see a situation for what it really is—an invaluable skill for those who want to succeed.
When you’re caught in a negative, troubling, or challenging situation in your career, anxiety, stress, agitation, and depression can cloud you from seeing a situation clearly for what it is. And operating from a clouded, anxious, stressed, or agitated state of mind can cause you to make the wrong decision or take the wrong approach for fixing a problem.
That agitation will block you from seeing the best solution.
Daily meditation offers you the ability to—at any time or place—step back from your agitation, anxiety, stress, depression, or negativity into pure clarity. When you’re operating from that clear state of mind, you’ll have the ability to take the best approach and create the best solution for any troubling situation or roadblock that you wind up in.
Your newfound clarity is going to improve your decision-making. It will do wonders for your professional life and your personal life as well.
Boost your creativity
David Lynch is a three-time-academy-award-nominated film director. The world knows David Lynch for his critically acclaimed creativity.
And according to Lynch’s well-known advocacy and a book he published in 2007 called Catching The Big Fish, his creative accomplishments would not be possible without his four-decades-long Transcendental Meditation practice.
In his book, Lynch reveals that prior to taking up meditation he suffered from a combination of anxiety, stress, and negativity that he describes as a “Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit.” But when he took up Transcendental Meditation, that
Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit” began to evaporate. And underneath that suffocating agitation and negativity, he discovered an endless supply of creativity that he used to rocket his film career to stardom.
Whether we create art for a living or not, we all need creativity in one way or another. Whether it’s writing a school paper, writing a report for your boss, writing your first book, planning your next career move, or even just planning your weekend, our lives involve a heavy amount of creativity.
At heart, human beings are creators. And Creativity is a crucial ingredient in success.
As David Lynch says, one of the best ways to improve creativity is daily meditation. Sitting in the stillness of meditation twice a day can melt away that suffocating anxiety, agitation, stress, and negativity that is blocking you from your best ideas. When that suffocating negativity melts away, you’re going to find an oasis of beautiful ideas and endless creativity underneath it.
Whether you’re a film director or not, that endless creativity is going to boost your success.
So my question to you is why haven’t you started meditating yet?
Featured image source: Moyan Brenn
