Finding Your Peace & Quiet
Productivity means staying focused, keeping busy and maintaining your eye on the prize. However in order to do this, we also have to find a way to calm ourselves to ensure we can maintain that needed focus. When we're always on the work grind, it can be hard to reach that state but is absolutely necessary for success.
Recently, our CEO Stacy Jones sat down with with an expert in the field of calming and centering the mind to discuss how we can better find balance. In this blog, Hollywood Branded examines why it is important to learn how to quiet your mind in order to maximize your creativity, productivity and success from the expertise of Matthew Ferry.
A Little More About Matthew
Matthew Ferry is the founder of Matthew Ferry International and he's an executive life coach, a spiritual teacher, and bestselling author of Quiet Mind Epic Life. For the last 26 years, Matthew has coached thousands of top performers to help them achieve enlightened prosperity.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: Can you start off by sharing, how'd you get here today? How did you get to the point where you are an expert on how to quiet your mind, how to actually allow your thoughts to grow?
Answer: I started my path on a quiet mind when I was nine years old and I had several experiences where I felt like I was floating above my body and I didn't know what it was, but I felt this profound peace and the experience. It was so powerful that as an adult, I was really driven to find this predictable path to get myself back to feeling what I could only describe as knowing that all as well, and after personally coaching now thousands of people from Wall Street to Main Street, I've discovered I'm not alone. Most people want to feel like all is well and especially executives and business owners and it's such a powerful feeling to experience a deep trust, to have this inner compass, like, "Hey, everything's going to be okay," so it's been a lifelong journey of mine, one that I don't really think that I chose. It was so intense when I was a kid that I had to figure out what's the way to do that, how do you get back there again?
Question: Is it something that you're just more in tune with the universe, is that the connection where when your mind is quiet, or is it just that you're not letting outer stimulus in to distract you and cause havoc and have you be freaking out about all the little things going on in your life?
Answer: That's a really good question. The answer is probably stranger than what most people are used to hearing and as a person who grew up in a personal development family, my father's mentor was a man named Earl Nightingale. He worked for Earl Nightingale for years many years and then my father started his own company. When I started working for my father and the real estate sales training industry, he exposed me to every mentor that he had been exposed to and then all the people that he wanted to be exposed to and for the most part, everybody was just reiterating these same old ideas over and over and over and they weren't leading me personally back to that state where I was in that bliss and that joy and that peace.
I made strides, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff that really is beneficial out there, but it wasn't until I had a breakthrough and realized that the mind chatter itself is an expression of survival consciousness and that the moment you step back and begin to realize that your business is not a survival situation, your marriage is not a survival situation, if this ad works, that's not a survival situation, and that you're going to be okay, so know no matter what, you're going to be okay.
The moment you start to get that, your mind doesn't actually need to be rehashing, "Well, what about this and what about that and what about this and what about ...?" Your mind doesn't need to be doing all of that stuff because all is well, everything's going to be okay, so it's more like, rather than intentionally trying to quiet your mind, what you're working to do is create a context where you realize your life is good the way that it is, you're okay, and there's not a threat to your existence. All the threats are predominantly imaginary. Of course there are real threats, but most of the threats to a marketer or a business owner or an entrepreneur, those threats are in our mind, and so when you neutralize them, your mind chatter starts to diminish and you go into a much more peaceful, open creative state.
Question: Some people will get on a spin where they focus on something and it's in their head and they can't get out of it and they just spin and spin. No matter what, it comes back to that, so how can they disrupt that and stop it and find a way to be more calm?
Answer: That's certainly one kind of chatter, but there are many functions. I call the talking in my mind the drunk monkey and it's all that craziness that's going on in your head. Let me just share a couple of things from my book here, Quiet Mind Epic Life.
Here are some of the important components of the drunk monkey: The drunk monkey has what I call "unconscious reflexes," so these are unconscious and it's sort of like when you hit your knee with a hammer, just blink, it pops up, your mind's the same way. Your mind will distract you with urgent matters that aren't urgent, your mind will lament, and it's typically doing these things: It's forecasting the negative, it has a desire to fit in, it's holding other people accountable to agreements that they never made, it's avoiding making the same mistake twice, it's following rules that don't exist, it's avoiding failure, and it has opinions on everything, including things it knows nothing about.
All of these things are survival strategies, so you and I were born with them, they just happen automatically, except those survival strategies are happening in such a way that they rob us of our peace, which means that we're not as creative as we want to be, we're not as resourceful as we want to be, our experience of life is diminished and we live in this illusion, like "Someday, when I achieve all this success, then finally, I'm going to be at peace and my family over for dinner and we're all going to be in the back yard, we're going to have drinks and it's going to be so amazing," and I will tell you that the vast majority of my clients have already made it and they're wondering when they're going to have their peace because money and success and accomplishment don't bring you the peace that everyone hopes that they would.
We also don't want to be unrealistic. There is a blend that can occur in the world that we're living in and I suspect that there are a certain percentage of your listeners that are extremely committed to feeling good, feeling happy, feeling positive, feeling energized, feeling connected. What happens is we get caught up in this delusion that I have to change the circumstances in order to have that happen, and actually, we have to shift the context, something called "recontextualization," that's what creates the peace.
Question: What's the first step to do that?
Answer: I think step one is to recognize that your mind is not your friend and that the talking in your head is not you, that it's automatic, that it's job is to navigate and to navigate a survival situation, so it's in a perpetual state of looking for what is negative and trying to avoid it and looking for what is positive and trying to acquire it, and if you are caught in one of those two domains, trying to avoid negativity or trying to get positivity, those two domains, even though they sound extremely practical, when you step all the way back, you realize the negative thing that you're trying to avoid isn't actually negative and the positive thing that you're trying to acquire won't actually fulfill you.
The mind is trained through genetics and through history, to survive, except you, me, our listener, we're not in an actual survival situation, so your mind is not your friend, but it's not an enemy either. You just begin to recognize, "Oh, this is a piece of my machinery." I don't steer the boat by looking at the radar, I look at the radar to gain information to then help me assess, how do I want to steer my boat? Where am I going? The radar's important information. The speaking that my mind is doing is giving me important information sometimes.
Question: If your mind is speaking and giving you important information and you're listening to all of this, how do you cut through the clutter? How do you decide where you should be listening and focusing versus where you should be taking a step back?
Answer: That is a really insightful question. You actually don't need to decide on that. When you begin to recognize what your mind's motivation is, you then can take every single thing that your mind says with a grain of salt and the moment your mind chatter, the talking in your head, the moment it's no longer important, might be interesting, might be curious, like "Gosh, I wonder where that thought came from," but the moment you remove the attachment to the thinking and you see that the mind itself is just a mechanism doing its thing, it's no different than your heart beating or your lungs, right? You don't make your heart beating mean anything. You don't make your lungs breathing mean anything. Your mind, your heart, your lungs are all the same thing, it's just a part of your biology.
The moment you don't make it important is the moment that you then have these intuitive leaps and that's for a marketer, that's the goal. That's where the goal is. It's in these, "Wait, whoa. You know what I should do?" Those moments of inspiration come much more frequently when you release the illusion that what you're doing is important, that you matter, that your business matters, all the survival stuff.
Check Out The Podcast!
This is really just the beginning of the conversation on how to quiet the mind and there is so much more to learn from Matthew's wisdom and experience. Check out the podcast below to learn more about how you an quiet your mind to optimize efficiency!
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