Meditation. 

How many of you do it? How many of you have tried it?

And what the heck does this have to do with your business?

I started integrating meditative breath work and some of these intuitive practices into my own business and that one small change has really had a positive effect on my life and business.

It seems silly, because when I first started I was like “Ok Kelsey, this is just going to help with anxiety, I’m going to meditate and we’ll just see what happens,” and I had very little expectation of it helping anything beyond that.

But….I’ve been blown away by the huge changes that have happened in my brain, my mindset, and my business over this entire year of practicing meditation daily (or almost daily, but I do manage to get at least five or six days in every week with a 20-minute morning meditation!)

So how has meditation changed my business?

I’m more level-headed when it comes to my business. I think that a lot of the decisions I’ve been making have come from this deep knowing, this intuitive guidance, and a feeling of “yes, this is the right choice and this is how I want to move forward,” and meditation really has helped me gain that perspective and that space in order to make decisions for my business and for my life that are in alignment.

When we don’t have that practice of taking that deep breath, taking that step back, and putting some space between our decisions and what we want, then we kind of just go into things without a plan, or we can get scared and not necessarily move forward in anything and basically get ourselves stuck.

What meditation has done is really help me practice taking that space, giving every decision and every situation a little bit of white space and a little bit of buffer room so that I can make a decision in alignment with my life and my business.

For example, about a year and a half ago I would get client emails where they’d want something immediately and it would be really stressful, or, there’d be kind of an awkward conversation that I’d have to have with somebody, and these are things would really stress me out to be honest.

Or, maybe we didn’t deliver up to client expectations 100% and I would get so internally devastated that I wasn’t perfect in my business, or that I wasn’t delivering something that wasn’t perfect the first time around, and I would get so upset and so much anxiety that I would just kind of freak out.

I would end up in these shame spirals all the time – and this isn’t something I’ve talked about before publicly because it’s not easy – but there would be times when things wouldn’t be perfect and I would just go cry in a corner on my couch or in my bed, and that was how I reacted to stressful situations in my business.

Looking back, I had an awesome year that year that I cried a lot, but what I’m most proud of is the ability that my mind has been able to create this white space around potentially stressful situations, and I feel a calmness that I haven’t felt before in my business and around the decisions I’m making. It’s just been insane, and I know that it all spurred from starting my daily meditative practice.

I knew going into meditation that it helped with anxiety, and it would give me some of those calm moments I wished for, but I really and truly did not know the depth that it would affect my business – it’s just been kinda crazy, but in a really good way!

How does it work?

If you ever have one of those stressful situations, mediation kind of helps you put it in bubble wrap so that you can slowly start to unravel the pieces and explore the tricky situation before you immediately react.

What mediation did for me was exactly that – it bubble wrapped the situation and allowed me to explore curiously anything that was going on in my life or business, so that I was able to create that white space around the situation and not immediately react. 

The only choice we ever have when a situation presents itself is to how we react to that situation, and meditation has seriously helped me react to those situations with so much more calmness and more stability and I’ve been able to explore how responding in different ways is going to affect my life, my business, or other people involved with the situation.

I’ve had lots of ups and downs and now I’m able to take that second, take that pause, and really kind of think through how I want to respond to situations because of the practice of meditation. This has been a huge win for me, and I am so excited about the secret gift that meditation gave to me in my life, and I feel so much more calm in every situation because of it. 

Which mediation should you use?

There’s many kinds of meditation and I’ve actually been working with two different kinds.

The first one is an app called Rituals. It’s actually a beauty app but they weirdly also have this little icon at the bottom for meditation and when you press play you can do a 5 to 20-minute guided meditation that uses the natural act of breathing to focus – and I do this every morning for 20-minutes. 

Another thing that I have been doing is working with my friend Amy Kuretsky, who is an acupuncturist out of Minneapolis that also does breathwork virtually. I could go on forever about this, but breathwork is a way to tap into your intuition and to kind of get some of these deeper answers from inside yourself. It takes you away from the busy thinking of your mind. Using a three-step breath you’ll feel this incredible buzz throughout your entire body, and it lets you get out of your head and really into your body.

At the end of the session Amy has you just sit there and pause and let your intuition, or the universe, or divine intervention, come to you and kind of give you the essence of what you really need and want in that moment without your busy mind getting in the way.

It’s an incredible experience, and if you are interested in going deeper, or working through some bigger blocks, breathwork is where you should be looking because it’s really great at moving some of the bigger things out of your body. It has really helped me personally deal with things in a bigger and better way, and if you’re looking for an answer for something and you’re just kind of wanting to tap into your own intuition, breathwork might be a really good way to tap into what your answer would be for you without any outside influence or anxieties getting in the way. 

One other little tip: I have a weird little ritual that I do before sales calls sometimes, though I should probably do it all the time: I tap into crystals and use their power to feel my own intuition. There’s something about doing this practice that helps me get into a calm space before a sales call that makes me feel really good.

I actually ordered two citrine stones from Amazon, which are all about manifestation, and I hold the stones in my hand and I do at least three deep breaths and just get to state of calm….and I know you’re probably thinking “ok, Kelsey is such a weirdo”  but it really does just help me feel the essence of abundance, manifestation, and calmness so that I can come to the table from a place of trying to help the other person work through whatever they’re working through, as opposed to coming from a place of “I need to make money for my business.”

I know the topic of meditation and crystals are a bit out there for many when talking business, but both have seriously helped me to be a better and more calm business owner, so if you’re on the fence about either, maybe give them a shot – what do you have to lose?