Embracing the Symphony of Life for Optimal Health and Happiness with Clif Smith
Join Clif Smith on a profound journey of self-discovery and transformation through mindfulness in this captivating episode of Health Gig. He shares the life-changing moment that led him to mindfulness, helping him transcend self-limiting beliefs and barriers to success. Explore mindfulness's essence, focusing on present-moment attention and non-judgment.
Clif highlights its impact on well-being, performance, leadership, and decision-making while emphasizing mindfulness's power in embracing life's journey, cherishing each moment, and savoring the true essence. Discover the potential of mindfulness for optimal health and fulfillment. This episode was recorded as part of the 2022 Achieving Optimal Health Conference.
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Website: https://clifsmith.com/
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Quotes:
“My first assignment after basic training was…jumping out of planes…very shortly after joining the military I had this opportunity to volunteer to go to airborne school and face that fear. When you can feel that level of fear in the body and in the mind, move through it, and be okay on the other side…when you can do that consistently there is really no goal that is out of reach.” - Clif Smith
“Mindfulness is an ability to keep our attention in the present moment on purpose, and it's allowing that present moment to unfold without getting too caught up in our automatic judgements and internal dialogues and internal commentary.” - Clif Smith
“Pose a question to yourself: what’s important now? Use what comes up in response to that question to help inform how you proceed, so that you can proceed with intention. So that you respond thoughtfully as opposed to reacting automatically.” - Clif Smith
Show Notes:
Clif Smith: I want to do three primary things for you today. I want to demystify mindfulness for you. I want to show you that you don't need any bells. You don't need any beads. You don't have to burn any incense and you don't have to go get a special cushion to put in a corner of your room in order to practice and benefit from mindfulness.
Clif Smith: You know, I think it's helpful to understand where someone's coming from, if they're going to be teaching mindfulness to you or introducing it. So I'm going to take you through my journey, through mindfulness.
Clif Smith: The first thing I learned was how to become mindful of unhelpful internal dialog. Those internal thoughts That said, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not strong enough, tall enough, rich enough, whatever, enough to even attempt to do the thing I was interested in. So I learned to become mindful of those unhelpful internal dialogs and stories and move forward despite them. The second thing I learned was how to become mindful of fear, learning how fear shows up in my body physiologically, learning how it shows up in my mind, and then learning to move forward despite the experience and presence of fear. And then the third thing was all about focus and concentration, learning to keep my attention where I wanted it to be, as opposed to where the distracting world wanted it to be.
Clif Smith: the day I left for the Army, I learned something about myself that day. I learned that I was absolutely terrified of heights and of flying. It was the first time I'd ever been on a plane.
Clif Smith: very shortly after joining the military, I had this opportunity to volunteer to go to airborne school and face that fear. And what I learned through that process is when you can feel that level of fear in the body and in the mind, move through it and be okay on the other side when you can do that consistently. There's really no goal that's out of reach.
Clif Smith: I started to get the sense that, you know, maybe I could go to college. Nobody in my family had been to college. So I started to dip my toe into college by taking college classes in my different military assignments around my career and eventually wrapped them all up into an online undergraduate degree at Bellevue University in Nebraska.
Clif Smith: We can have a whole discussion about what success and true fulfillment is, but I certainly had enough evidence in my life that just because something seems impossible or feels impossible or my brain tells me it's impossible doesn't mean it actually is impossible.
Clif Smith: From our brains perspective, failure equals pain. And so in order to avoid that pain, my brain serves up the thoughts, the beliefs and the impulses that would nudge me toward safety, towards inaction in this case, to keep me in my comfort zone. Well, our comfort zones are more like cages.
Clif Smith: Long story, long, I went to Harvard. I got my master's degree. And as I reflected on that entire process, that's what inspired me to become an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher and now a speaker and author on mindfulness because it's such a powerful tool for helping us uncover. And transcend our self-limiting beliefs and other psychological barriers to our success and our happiness.
Clif Smith: Most people talk about mindfulness tend to keep it in a narrow frame around wellbeing, and it does a great deal of well-being. But it also helps with your performance, your leadership decision making under pressure.
Clif Smith: One of the things companies do is they try to transform themselves. And the reason they do this is because the world is transformed. The volume and velocity of data, of change, of new innovative technologies that companies have to incorporate into their business models just to survive is massive. And so they have to transform. Not so they survive, but so they thrive in those transformative world.
Clif Smith: We touch our phones on average 2617 times a day. What's surprising about that number, other than the fact that it's so large, is that there's only 24 hours in a day. Hopefully you get to sleep for some of those. And so when you add sleep time into the calculation, now we're looking at a statistic that's telling us we're touching our phones on the order of 1 to 3 times per minute.
Clif Smith: According to a Harvard study, 47% of the time our bodies are in one place, but our minds are wandering to the future or to the past. Lost in thought. And this number correlates with unhappiness. So the more our minds are wandering, the more likely we are to be unhappy.
Clif Smith: This negativity bias, it impacts our entire reality. It creates stories that aren't in service to our goals or our happiness. And it can make otherwise benign situations seem kind of miserable. It's why people in a metal tube going from New York to LA in five hours experiencing the miracle of flight will complain because the Wi-Fi is a little slow or because they had a 15 minute delay, totally overlooking what's pretty amazing about their situation. Now grant you the Wi-Fi might be a little slow in your aircraft, but it's connecting to a satellite that humans built, put on top of a rocket launched into space and it orbits our planet. And then using an invisible signal bouncing off of that satellite, you get connected to the largest body of knowledge we've ever amassed as a species. So that's kind of cool.
Clif Smith: I don't want you to walk away thinking that mindfulness is about sweeping the negative under the rug, having blinders on to true challenges in one's life, and then only seeing rainbows and butterflies and sprinkles and only having happy thoughts and only feeling joyous feelings. If anybody claiming to be a mindfulness teacher ever tries to teach you that, I'd head the other direction as quickly as possible because they're sending you down a very unhelpful path. But one of the things mindfulness can do for you is it can give you fuller access to the entire range of your experience as opposed to primarily getting caught up in what's not meeting our expectations.
Clif Smith: I shared with you that you don't have to add anything into your life in order to practice mindfulness. And so we're going to focus on for this meditation are the physical sensations of breathing. And any time our minds wander away, we're going to notice what our minds got caught in, and we're going to bring our attention to noticing the sensations of breathing again. And when you do that, it's called an awareness of breath meditation.
Clif Smith: Could you imagine a Major League Baseball pitcher throws a pitch, batter hits a home run, and that pitcher just gets caught up in rumination for the next 20 or 30 minutes. I can't believe I made such a stupid mistake. What an idiot. What's wrong with me? And he ruminates like that for the next 2 or 3 batters. You think he would even be in the major leagues? I doubt it.
Clif Smith: This is what the brain does. It creates these elaborate stories. We eventually get lost in thought and we bring our attention back.
Clif Smith: The point of dancing isn't to get from one spot on the dance floor over to a different spot on the dance floor. The point is in the dancing itself. So when enjoy your journey, it's not going to look like your plan or your expectations, but that's okay. Each of those moments, high or low, is a note in the symphony of your life. Be grateful for them. Be present for them.
Clif Smith: mindfulness isn't just going to help increase your emotional intelligence and make you a better leader. It's not just going to help you navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life with a bit more resilience and a bit less stress. It's not just going to help you catch and release unhelpful internal dialog and other psychological barriers to your success and happiness. It'll do all those things, but what it'll also do is help you greet the last moments of your journey knowing that you were awake for the whole show. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the sweetest fruits of mindfulness.