#179 Consolidating the knowledge (4. Stoicism, Meditation, Entrepreneur mindsets)

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Episode Transcript

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Agi Keramidas  0:02  
Welcome to the personal development mastery podcast. I am Agi Keramidas and my mission is to inspire you to grow, stand out and take action towards the next level of your life. I interview leaders, authors, successful entrepreneurs, spiritual teachers, exceptional people who will inspire you to improve your life. Tune in for two episodes each week, and make sure you subscribe to get them as soon as they are released. 

Welcome to Episode 179. This is the fourth time the fourth episode of consolidating the knowledge and let me quickly explain again why I started doing this. I realised that after having spoken with over 100 guests on my podcast, that during these conversations, there were many ideas that they were actionable knowledge that was implementable. However, I realised that many of them remained only ideas, I never took the action on them and allow them to change and grow me. And of course in time they were forgotten. So in this consolidation episodes, I revisit some of the previous podcast episodes and I pick up specific actionable items, key knowledge that can be learned and implemented from them.

 So today, I will revisit episodes 13, and 14, episode 13 was crease brands and osteopath by profession and also a speaker, philosopher and key meditator passionate about personal development. One of the things he talked about was living an intentional life. He described it as a way of reflecting on your own life, a way of reflecting how you spend your time, money, but most importantly, your attention and keeping questioning. Is it true to you? Are you living your purpose? Are you living your vitals? The key learnings that came from that part of the conversation was that you should never compare yourself to others only compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And when you compare yourself to who you were yesterday, the next question from that is, what's one thing that I can do today to be a little bit better than yesterday. And this shift your focus into a more empowering one of personal growth and improvement. 

Another thing we discussed was stoicism. stoic philosophy, which both grace and me are great fan of. Chris told me that the reasons he likes reading stoicism is that it makes him really realise that no problems are new, no problems are unique. And that the framework of the problems that they were dealing with two and a half, 1000 years ago, when that philosophy started, it is exactly the same as the framework of the problems we are dealing with today. And we all have our own first person view of the world and look out from our own eyes and our own senses our own ego. Because when a problem happens, when something happens, we think it is happening to us. And when you read things from literally 1000s of years ago, they were dealing with same things and having the same anxieties. And that makes you feel less unique, in a good way makes you realise that other people have dealt with the same problems that you're facing. And that factor alone makes the problem seem a little bit smaller. Knowing that millions of people have dealt with the same thing in the past. Crease refer to stories is mass, the practice of dealing with problems. And let's listen to him explain this. It's a very important point.

Chris Branch  4:39  
stoicism for me is is the practice of dealing with problems. It's a way of reframing things in your mind consciously. I should also say this will probably come up in conversation but I like stoic philosophy as a conscious way of reframing problems. And then I find it works perfectly when coupled With meditation, which is a way of actually not trying to change anything, but just observing the present moment experience in the present moment. So I find stoicism and meditation work quite well together. And that the stoicism is like say, each time I'm faced with a problem, no matter how big and how small, it's almost like that's, I call it the the bicep curl of philosophy because then you can read stoicism. And it's it's very important to understand the understand it from a conceptual level. But you only really get to test yourself when life gets hard. So each new problem that life throws at us and that's, that's the bicep curl. That's you lifting the weights in the gym. And you get to test how well you're going to cope with it. How well do you get to apply your philosophy when life is at its hardest?

Agi Keramidas  5:53  
Another topic we talked about was meditation. Chris has been meditating for many years. And he told me that meditation is his keystone habit, the one that glues everything else together. He said that over the years, he's been meditating, he found that every now and then there are jumps that that's how he called them jumps in the practice, as in the next level of practising meditation. And he spoke about the author and philosopher, Sam Harris and his podcast and his meditation app, which, incidentally, I started using from there known since that conversation. So the app is called waking up. And it focuses on the concept of non dualism. And he helps you by giving techniques to turn your attention back to itself, to start looking for the observer, the seat of attention. And the more you look for the observer, the more it breaks down, and you're left with no observer, just this open space of consciousness. An important distinction he made was about altered states and altered traits.

Chris Branch  7:28  
In meditation, they talk about there being altered states and altered traits. So an altered state might be the blissfulness you feel when you're meditating. And over the years, I've had ridiculous, altered states really quite incredible moments in time where during a meditation, I just feel the joy of gratitude for being alive in all sorts of strange and wonderful, weird feelings. But really, they are just altered states in the moment that don't really matter in the rest of your life. They're lovely. But the main reason I'm doing meditation is to alter my traits in in day to day life.

Agi Keramidas  8:08  
And he used an example of something that most people are nervous of public speaking. He said, Imagine if you were about to speak to hundreds people, and you have been relying on meditation or breath work or things like that to come down. Obviously, you can't stand in front of the those people and start meditating and taking breaths, doing breath work to get you into that place of calmness. Whereas if the meditation practice you have been doing is paying attention to thoughts, paying attention to feelings, no matter whether you deem them to be nice, good or bad. Then you can pay attention to your clammy palms, you can pay attention to your racing heart and your butterflies in the stomach. And you can also pay attention to that thought that I'm not good enough for have not prepared or the people won't like me or might be ridiculed. So paying attention to these thoughts, but stepping outside them, just observing them is a trait and altered trait that happens as a result of having practised meditation. 

Chris also talked about a specific meditation practice that he does, and it's quite a long meditation at least 45 minutes and it's where you sit completely stay. And when you do that, you will find that after about 20 minutes, it gets very uncomfortable. But the thing is that when you're sitting completely still, you're not actually injuring yourself. So you can Sitting this position for 40 minutes plus, it will get uncomfortable and you will notice your pain levels rising and rising. And as that happens, your body wants to move away from it. And you just observe that sensation and the thoughts that come with it. But you stay still and accept the pain. And the more you practice it, the better you get. 

And last week, comment about something else we discussed minimalism. And I will only shared an important distinction that I made during our conversation, and that was that minimalism is not about getting rid of everything. It's just asking with intentionality. Does this thing add value to my life? Do I need it? Or does it detract from my life in any way. 

So these were some of my key learnings from that episode. And let's move on to the next one. Episode 14 was Reem Kharbat. A business coach, successful entrepreneur who has built three six figure businesses in four years, and also a podcast host of the show, the entrepreneur accelerator. Reem has an inspiring story of transformation, where from being raised in Jordan, a small country in the Middle East in a very conservative society and raced to be to study to become a good employee to find a good job. She decided to go and travel to the USA on her own to study because that was his dream. And one of the messages that came across multiple times during our conversation with Reem was persistence. And Reem shared the defining moment in her life when she was in her corporate job back in the Middle East. She had climbed the corporate ladder quickly, and she has become a member of the directors, the board of directors. And she said that in that middle eastern culture, it's very difficult to find women in leading positions. And so when she was pregnant, that was something that the rest of the board had much resistance to. So, On the day that she gave birth, instead of receiving gratulations, she received a text from her boss, asking her to quit. That triggered her to start with her husband, their first business.

And a key point that she made was that as a human being, you are capable of doing amazing things. You just need to believe in it, and to be committed to achieve it. There is power, when you feel that when you believe it and you are committed. In terms of actionable knowledge, when we talked about the mindset of a successful entrepreneur, she shared some of the tools that she uses. And one of them was to write down every day, what you really want in life, write it down and keep looking at it every day. And also things like a vision board or affirmations help with this because all of them activate the reticular activating system. Let's listen to REM talking about commitment and success.

Reem Kharbat  13:57  
First of all, it starts in here it starts in your own mind, to equip yourself by just reminding yourself on a daily basis. Why am I doing this? What where I want to go? Why am I here? If you remind yourself that it's okay because as they say success leaves, leaves clues. That's so true. Looking at all the stories, all the success stories for different people all around the world. What happened is that it was not an easy ride for them. But they were committed. They were consistent. They believed in their idea or in what they're doing. And they did not quit. The only failure is the person who quits who who does not wait until he succeeds. This is it.

Agi Keramidas  14:45  
She also talked about the $1 million idea and that from the ideas that come in our mind. One of them could be your million dollar idea and The problem with lots of people who are creative is that they don't write their ideas down. And these ideas get lost, they get forgotten. So her advice was, when you have an idea, write it down. Keep a place where you write down all the ideas you have, and from time to time, look at them, and the ones that resonate, take action on them. But it all starts by writing them down when you have them because they are forgotten so easily. One last thing that Reem shared with me during our conversation was the secret recipe that uses that's how she called it to achieve what she wants in her life in business. She called it the Ask method, a very simple way.

Reem Kharbat  15:52  
I call it the Ask method, which is just simply go and ask people, they assume that they will get no as an answer. It's just in your hands. Okay, yes. Maybe she will say no, maybe she will say yes. And she said yes. Oh, wow. And it worked again. Um, I said that because it happened with me at so many things. And now I'm not scared at all to approach any person in this life, because we're all human beings. So she's a normal, she's a billionaire. So what?

Agi Keramidas  16:29  
So these were my reflections and actionable items that I acquired from these conversations. And I have mentioned before that this approach, these consolidation episodes, is something new for me as well. And I'm tweaking it as we go along. And that's why I really appreciate your feedback. So last week, I had feedback from some of you and there was one listener in particular suggested that rather than going through the episodes in coronal chronological order, as I have been pretty much doing so far, that it would be more useful if instead, I revisit the episodes in more a topic based manner. In other words, episodes where my guests spoke about similar topics. So that's something for me to certainly consider and implement in the near future. Again, I really appreciate your feedback. After all, you are listening to this and I want it to be as useful as possible.

Thank you very much for listening. And until next time, stand out don't fit in!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai