Are you constantly juggling responsibilities and feeling overwhelmed by the relentless demands of your career and personal life? The pressure to perform, manage teams, and meet deadlines can leave you feeling depleted, affecting your mental and physical health. 

But what if there’s a way to break free from it all using a technique that can be seamlessly integrated into your hectic schedule? Embrace meditation, and you’ll not only enhance your performance, but also cultivate a sense of peace and resilience that will ripple through every aspect of your life.

Jennifer K. Hill is an Evolutionary Leader, entrepreneur, author, speaker, Podcaster and TV host. She has hosted popular shows with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton, and many other leaders from around the world on her Regarding Consciousness podcast. After exiting her first company in 2018, she recently co-founded a new company in the technology space,OptiMatch (om.app) that utilizes their proprietary algorithm and built in AI to align and enhance trust in business relationships. When she is not hosting, speaking or building companies she loves to give back and has built two schools in 3rd world countries.

In this episode, Jennifer discusses the transformative power of meditation and related techniques in enhancing resilience and managing stress for busy executives.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Discover how meditation can help in personal transformation and mental health improving self-regulation and reducing reactivity.
  • Learn how to go about your day with meditation to maintain mental and emotional balance.
  • Find out how to perform muscle testing on oneself to determine intuitive answers.

“What I love about it [meditation] from a neurodiverse standpoint and an executive standpoint, is that we have this opportunity to connect to that stillness and to quiet the voice. And it helps so much from a self-regulation standpoint.”

– Jennifer Hill

Valuable Free Resource: 

Topics Covered:

02:04 – How failures and early challenges led to her great career journey

05:38 – Never regretting life’s situations only thankful for what great things came out of it

06:19 – What made her develop OptiMatch and how will it help everyone from coaches to communities

09:06 – How she found herself doing meditation, how it helped her and the number of hours it takes for her to do it

11:34 – Jennifer’s detailed explanation of her daily meditation and grounding practice and its significance in maintaining mental and emotional balance

15:53 – How she perceives intuitive answers through auditory sensations and feelings in her throat

19:50 – The right best way to do the muscle testing

21:48 – Can’t imagine how she would gone through the difficult events in her life without meditation

22:40 – Sharing her favorite Insight Timer meditations

26:03 – How meditation and mindfulness techniques can build resilience

28:42 – Helpful tips and resources on how you can start incorporating meditation into your hectic schedules. 

31:33 – Do one need professional help to learn how to meditate?

33:58 – Q: How to cultivate compassion? A: Be compassionate with yourself and be thoughtful of not shoulding on yourself.

Key Takeaways:

“And as you say these mantras, you’re giving your brain something, like giving your mouth something to chew on. And the idea is, as we repeat the mantra over and over, it begins to quiet the noise and the chatter, and you allow the thoughts to kind of float past as though they’re going past on clouds. And then after time, you just sink more and more deeply in. And then you find the stillness.” – Jennifer Hill

“And when we learn to contain it and to go within it gives us a greater capacity to be with other people and to not be so reactionary with people.” – Jennifer Hill

“When I started doing that [grounding technique], it helped me to go through a divorce of getting out of a relationship that wasn’t healthy, to find my soulmate, to build the new business, to gain self-confidence.” – Jennifer Hill

“You essentially love and cherish yourself rather than looking externally to spouses, children, whomever, for validation.” – Jennifer Hill

“I suggest to people to do this [cultivating intuition] after you’ve meditated because you quiet all that noise and then you can be more tuned to, is it in my highest and best good to go into this business deal with someone? Is it in my highest best good to date someone? And it helps to really sharpen our awareness.” – Jennifer Hill

Ways to Connect with Jennifer Hill:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Jennifer Hill 00:00

If you can shift the should from should to, ‘Oh, I could! Wow, that really piqued my interest.’ Do it from a place of openness and curiosity and not from another box to check. Because otherwise, it’s the way we approach something. If we have it that we should do it, we’re going to create resistance to it.

Sarah E. Brown 00:27

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.

My guest today is Jennifer Hill. She’s an evolutionary leader, an entrepreneur, author, speaker, podcaster, and TV host. She has hosted popular shows with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton, and many other leaders from around the world on her Regarding Consciousness podcast. After exiting her first company in 2018, she recently co-founded a new company in the technology space called OptiMatch, that utilizes a proprietary algorithm and with built-in AI that aligns and enhances trust in business relationships. When she’s not hosting, speaking or building companies, she loves to give back and has built two schools in third world countries. What a great bio. Jennifer, welcome and thanks for being here.

Jennifer Hill 01:49

Thank you, Sarah. It’s such a pleasure to be with you and your listeners.

Sarah E. Brown 01:53

Oh, it’s great to have you. So I have to ask, tell me a little bit of history about your previous companies and how you got into the work you’re in today.

Jennifer Hill 02:04

Well, as many things often go, a lot of failures led up to the previous companies. It’s kind of a funny story. I had left high school at 16 and went straight to college. People didn’t believe me. I remember showing them my driver’s license when I was in college at 16 and I graduated high school early and then because I left high school and I ended up in college, I graduated college early and I had taken AP classes in lieu of normal classes while I was in high school. And I got a phone call, Sarah, like something out of one of those terrible nightmares that you have, waking up in a cold sweat. Literally three months after I graduated, I’m planning to go to law school. I’m studying for the LSATs. My university calls and says, oops, you didn’t graduate. You’re missing a class from high school, US History 101. I passed AP European history with flying colors. And they said, we can’t give you your diploma. So you have two options. Option number one is to come back to school for a semester. I had already moved out of the area, or option number two is to take a two-hour oral exam pass or fail on a thousand page book on US History 101 with the dean of the school. So luckily, I’m very good at regurgitating information and I wound up passing that test. However, it impeded my ability to apply to law school that year and through a series of serendipities, I got three job offers while I was waiting for another year to apply to law school, one of which was to become a recruiter. I didn’t even know what a recruiter was, and it turned out I had a little bit of a knack for it.

So after working for about five years for my first company, the only real company I’ve worked for since being out of college, I went off to be a consultant and a speaker. Here I am, like 27, 28 years old, full of vim and vigor and thinking I’m going to change the world and be paid tens of thousands of dollars. That was an epic failure. That was in 2008, I think it was, that I left that company. I gave up my six-figure job and opened a consulting company and a little secret I made about 5K. I went from making like 185,000 to 5K the next year. And again, life kind of worked out that whole time people had baked me to come back in the industry. And I went back temporarily as a partner to a recruiting agency and I realized my ex-husband was the inspiration for it.

He said, my love, you’re so smart. You have so many clients, why don’t you just open up your own company? So next thing you know, I opened my first recruiting company, never in a million years knowing anything about business. I had never taken a business class in my life. My best childhood friend gave me a book at that time called How to Build a Small Business for Dummies, which was my only foray into business. And next thing you know, I had a team of thriving people and we sold the company seven years later. And then that completely pivoted 180, the same university. Here’s where the story gets really juicy and fun. So UC Irvine was the university that has screwed up my transcripts. Now, 20 years later, almost exactly. I’ve now sold this first company and I was very involved with UCI at the time and they said, Jennifer, we know you’re a speaker. We would love to have you come and co-moderate a panel with Deepak Chopra and Don Hoffman. And next thing you know, I was doing a panel with Deepak and 20 episodes later, he and Don Hoffman and I have become friends and done a series of shows. And then I kind of went more into the mental health space and now have built a software company called OptiMatch that is based on creating greater alignment and human connection.

Sarah E. Brown 05:24

Wow. So, I want to ask questions about OptiMatch in a minute, but it kind of makes the point that you got to be careful who you blame for what? Because they actually facilitated a really good connection for you.

Jennifer Hill 05:38

Yeah. That’s why I never, like, I never put UCI down because it’s so easy. I talk often to people about our future, and we have so many things, Sarah, that something happens in our life. We get a divorce, something traumatic happens, we lose a loved one. Your university calls and says, oops, you didn’t graduate. And then here you are 20 years later. And had I chosen, I got accepted to most of the UC schools at the time. Who knows where my life might’ve gone if I hadn’t chosen that school. Right? And gone through that experience.

Sarah E. Brown 06:09

Very interesting. So say a bit about OptiMatch because that’s a very interesting concept that you’re working on now.

Jennifer Hill 06:19

So people often ask me, why did you develop OptiMatch? And I tell people out of survival, it’s going to make me tear up a little bit, Sarah, because it’s a very personal journey. When I was very young one of the reasons I left high school earlier is I didn’t know at the time, I only discovered 20 plus years later whe, I sold my company that I was what’s considered neurodiverse or high functioning on the spectrum. And so when people say, how did you come up with OptiMatch? It’s because when I was in the recruiting business, I had to study people like they were a science experiment, because it’s like you got a book on how to be a human being. And my book was quite frankly blank inside.

So it left me depressed, suicidal, angry, anxious, confused, reactive, a multitude of things. And it was only about 11 years ago that I began meditating and learning self-regulation tools that I’ve now been able to be more present with people without having to mask or worry that I’m saying or doing the wrong thing. And part of that has come out of studying people. So fast forward, my business coach, who also, god bless him as neurodiverse, he had helped me exit the last company. And after that he said, Jen, you have such an innate ability to match people and connect people. He said, why don’t we create a mathematical formula that mirrors your intuition? So after eight months of intense testing and development, we went through eight months of developing the questionnaire that can now be found at om.app/survey. If you want to try it, we can give you a free report you can find there.

And we spent about eight months developing it, another year and a half testing it got to an 87% satisfaction rate. And it’s been so humbling, Sarah, all the different ways that people want to use this. We have communities that want to use it to match their members together. We have marketplaces of coaches and therapists that want to use it, outsourcing companies. I found my own assistant using it. I was preparing for a major tech conference here in Lisbon last year called Web Summit. And I had a month to prep for the conference, and it was our first time like featuring the product. And I went to an agency and I said, I need your help. I want you to send our matching survey to your top three applicants with these skills. And I selected Albert, our assistant sight unseen, and he’s been with us seven months. So there’s a lot of different ways to use it.

Sarah E. Brown 08:43

Wow! What a great example of using what you’re strong in and turning it into a business. So the topic that we agreed we were going to talk about here, which you’ve done a very nice segue into, was the topic of meditation. So how did you get pointed in that direction and why?

Jennifer Hill 09:06

I was very fortunate that both a client and employee of mine, one of the employees who worked with me, had worked with me at a prior company. So we’ve been friends for a while, and she and a client at the same time, same year, both introduced me to a technique called transcendental meditation. Now, the irony of this is years earlier, probably eight, 10 years earlier, I had tried to meditate and failed. I hear so many horror stories from executives and friends who say, oh, Jen, I can’t; I can’t quiet my mind for 30 seconds, let alone 30 minutes. And it was only after, for me, introduction into TM, which is mantra-based meditation. Now, TM is very specific in that it’s a specific mantra to your vibration. So everybody has a different one though, whether you ever study TM or not, there are many, many different sorts of mantras that you can say in your mind over and over.

And as you say, these mantras, you’re giving your brain, it’s kind of like giving your mouth something to chew on. You’re giving your brain something. And the idea is, as we repeat the mantra over and over, it begins to quiet the noise and the chatter, and you allow the thoughts to kind of float past as though they’re going past on clouds. And then after time, you just sink more and more deeply in. And then you find the stillness. And what I love about it from a neurodiverse standpoint and an executive standpoint, is that we have this opportunity to connect to that stillness and to quiet the voice. And it helps so much Sarah, from a self-regulation standpoint. Like , if you ask anybody who knew me, premeditation era versus post, people can’t believe it when I tell them I’m a recovering jerk. They’re like, what? You, you’re a recovering jerk? You like, sit? I spend about two hours a day now in meditation and reflection and prayer among other things. But most people can’t fathom that I used to be a pretty big jerk back in the day because I didn’t know how to self-regulate. And so I was constantly being reactive and getting my mess all over other people. And when we learn to contain it and to go within it gives us a greater capacity to be with other people and to not be so reactionary with people.

Sarah E. Brown 11:27

You say that you are spending about two hours a day. Is that all in one lump time? Or do you spread it out?

Jennifer Hill 11:34

In the mornings people often ask me about what my practice is. My morning practice normally begins by going and sitting. I’ll write down 10 things that I’m grateful for. Many experts and scientists have studied this. So I always begin the day with 10 things that I’m grateful for and end the day with three things that I’m grateful for. So I start off by writing 10 things I’m grateful for. Then I journal. There’s a lot of science behind that too, just to kind of empty the mind. Then I go into the meditation part of the practice, and that’s normally about 30 minutes in the morning. And so I’ll sit there and meditate anywhere from, depending on how busy my morning is, 25 minutes to 40 minutes, depending on what I need. I think scientifically that 20 minutes is kind of ideal if you can get that 20 to 25 minutes in, especially in the morning.

And then from there I go into a technique called heart-focused breathing by HeartMath. So as I’m transitioning, this is actually a very important worthwhile thing to mention. If you’re new to meditation, when I started meditating 11 years ago, the funniest thing happened. Sarah, I felt so peaceful in the meditation, and I would come out and I would be even more angry than I was before. And I remember I called my mentors at the time and I said, Shannon, why is this happening? Why am I being so reactive after I come out of meditation? And I’ll always remember what she said to me, Sarah. She said, Jen, on a scale of one to 10, how stressful is your life? And I said, 12 at the time. I was like building the company, writing my first book, doing all the things. And she said, great. Are you doing anything to ground yourself in your meditation?

And I was like, huh, what does that mean? And so she explained to me a technique that I now use to visualize light and go down to the center of the earth and other things to ground myself, “in the meditation.” So that’s why I have a bit of a process after I come out to be sure that I’m grounded. Because Shannon explained to me, Jen, you’re shocking yourself back into the whole 12 stress body if you’re not giving yourself that appropriate transition time. So that’s why after I do the meditation, I’ll do heart maths, heart-focused breathing for about five minutes, just breathing in, calm or ease, and really regulating my nervous system that’s been physiologically proven to create DHEA, which is the longevity hormone to decrease cortisol. So then I transition into heart-focused breathing, then I use Shannon’s grounding technique of visualizing, a kind of white light going down to the center of the earth, coming back up and settling in my heart.

And then the final things I do is I spend time working with the inner child that has been mind blowingly instrumental for me is I spend, gosh, I’ve been doing it for about seven years now, and I’ll spend about five minutes just checking in with myself. I was just teaching this to a bunch of executives who run law firms at a conference I was speaking at in January. And it’s very simple. You just put your right hand on your heart, left hand on your abdomen, or either or, and you talk to yourself as though you’re at whatever age you might be at. Most of us have a 5-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old child within us who feels neglected. And you basically say, hi sweetheart, how are you doing? And two of my friends who both taught me this years ago, changed my life.

When I started doing that, it helped me to go through a divorce of getting out of a relationship that wasn’t healthy, to find my soulmate, to build a new business, to gain self-confidence. So you essentially love and cherish yourself rather than looking externally to spouses, children, whomever, for validation. And then the last thing I do is I work on cultivating my intuition by asking a series of yes and no questions about what my day will entail. Is it in my highest and best good to do this interview with Sarah today? Yes or no? Will I do the interview with Sarah today? Different question, yes or no? And then I cross check how aligned my intuition is. And it really serves well in business about 70 to 80% of the time. What I hear and what I physically write down after the end of this is very, very much accurate. And I suggest to people to do this right after you’ve meditated because you quiet all that noise and then you can be more tuned to, is it in my highest and best good to go into this business deal with someone? Is it in my highest and best good to date someone? And it helps to really sharpen our awareness.

Sarah E. Brown 15:53

And how do you hear the answers? Do you hear a sense or do you audibly hear something I said here, because I’m an audible processor, that’s my bias. So, how do you know that you’ve gotten an answer?

Jennifer Hill 16:08

Great question. It’s a really good question because I’ve talked to many, many other people about this. For me, I hear auditorily, yes and no. And I also feel it in the back of my throat. So it’s almost like in the back of my throat, I’ll begin to form the words yes and no. I have a lot of clients I work with. There’s something called human design. So I only take on about five coaching clients at a time. But the first thing I do when I work with a coaching client is I do their human design. Because 70% of the world are what’s called generators or manifesting generators. And unequivocally, Sarah, they feel aha on their body. They may not hear it. Some people, it’s like a gut feeling that they have. But when I’m working with a client who is a generator or man-gen, which I’m not, I’m a projector, then I’m going to ask them yes or no questions.

Like somebody I was working with, for example, got an offer on Shark Tank, and she was beside herself, do I take the offer, do I not? And we sat down and we had her do some quiet, heart focused breathing. And then I just turned the question around. I said, is it in your highest and best to take this offer from X, Y, Z? And she got unequivocally a No. And thank God she didn’t take the offer. It wound up being really, really good for her from a business decision because now she has even more money coming into the other business than she would’ve had had she taken the offer. So it’s about that alignment. And I love that HeartMath has so much great research on this about our heart’s intuition, where I think they did a study that you can find online where they showed a series of images to participants. And some of the images were very peaceful, calm images. And some of the images were very evocative, like war, death, horrible images. And if I’m remembering the study correctly, a few seconds or like a few milliseconds before the image was shown, the heart actually knew before it happened and would have a physiological response in the negative or positive, depending on the image. So it’s a cool scientific study if anybody ever wants to go research it.

Sarah E. Brown 18:07

Very interesting. Jack Canfield taught me a technique called muscle testing for that is, is it in your best and highest interest? The problem with that is that it takes somebody else to help you do it.

Jennifer Hill 18:21

You don’t need that. You can do it without it. I muscle test myself every day. So, oh, this is not on video, so I can’t really show it well, but there is, it’s kinesthesiology. I know the one that Sarah’s referring to is where you have your arm out. I do that with my husband all the time. But aesthetic testing, however, there are many ways that you can do it by yourself and for yourself using fingers or knees or other things.

Sarah E. Brown 18:45

Describe the finger one because my cousin is able to do that one.

Advertisement 18:48

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Jennifer Hill 19:50

Yeah, I never used to be able to do it. So actually it was so cute. Somebody had taught me how to do this. The secret to muscle testing is to have your head straight looking forward. So imagine that my head is just in the normal position as though I were looking straight ahead and my eyes have to be down. So your head is just kind of pointed as though you’re looking forward, but your eyes look down and you have to be well hydrated and up. And then my right and left thumb and index finger, and I’m going to hook them together like they’re like two little rings. Like those rings that you would use a magician would use. And if I’ve done this right, I’m going to set up or stand, look down with my eyes looking down, and I’m going to say, my name is Jennifer.

And if you do it correctly, you should feel like a strong yes. So the two fingers that are in these loop together, the index finger of the right hand and thumb and the index finger of the left hand and thumb, those look together when they pull, a yes would be them staying together. Now, what’s fascinating is every single muscle in the body weakens when you get a no. So Bruce Lipton was the one who taught me about the muscle testing thing. And he said, Jen, even your eyes weaken when it’s a no. If you’re trying to do an eye test and somebody’s telling you something that’s not true, or you’re saying something that’s not true, even your eyes will weaken. So you start off with simple things like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And pull, no, no, no, no, no. And you’re not going to be able to keep your fingers together when you get a no. And so it takes a little bit of practice. I never used to be able to do it until Bruce taught me the exact way how he was taught how to do it. And ever since then, I’ve now been able to do it.

Sarah E. Brown 21:3

Very interesting. So you’ve been meditating now for how many years?

Jennifer Hill 21:36

11 years. It started in 2013.

Sarah E. Brown 21:39

Is there any major event that has helped you get through that you wouldn’t have gotten through as well without the benefit of meditating?

Jennifer Hill 21:48

Everything; life, divorce, I mean, my God, divorce, running the company. So I haven’t missed a day of meditation now in 11 years. And to go back to your earlier question, I do try to squeeze in one or two more meditations throughout the day. So I start the day with TM. Then throughout the day, if I’m driving anywhere, I don’t drive. So if somebody else is driving me, then I’ll sit in the back of an Uber or Bolt or whatever it is, and I’ll listen to Insight Timer. And I have actually a heart focused meditation that I love, that’s 12 minutes. And then I’ll typically do another one in the afternoon. TM recommends doing one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and HeartMath as well. They say that our bodies are like a cell phone, right? And if we don’t recharge our bodies, which is what things like heart focused breathing do what meditation does, then we’re going to be depleted by the end of the day.

So that is why it’s very helpful to do some form of meditation, heart-focused breathing, something to put your body back in a state of physiological coherence between say, two and five o’clock. So if I have it all my way, I like to get in like three meditations in a day, and then I listen to a 25 minute meditation as I go to sleep every night. And I’m a big fan of Insight Timer there. In fact, I’ll share on the show right now some of my favorite Insight Timer meditations, in case anybody wants to look it up. You can get a membership to Insight Timer, I think for like $30 a year for the cheapest one. So it’s not cost prohibitive. So my favorite ones are the 12-minute Guided Meditation by Mel Schweder, S-C-H-W-E-D-E-R. And that’s called Heart Coherence Meditation. I listen to that one almost every day.

My evening meditation I do every night. I have not missed for like seven years. I love this one. A friend of mine, Allison created it. It’s Allison Serour, S-E-R-O-U-R. I think it has like 80,000 listens. And it’s a 25 minute one that’s all about forgiveness and like talking to our soul and our higher self as we fall asleep. And that’s called a Alistic Evening Meditation for Your Soul. And the other two that I use from time to time, one is a four-minute meditation, sometimes we’re pressed, and we don’t have 10 or 20 minutes to devote. And we’re feeling really activated. Another one is Lisa Abramson’s. Five Minutes of Self-Compassion. It’s technically only four minutes, but I love it because she says you put your hand on your heart and she has, you say, ‘I’m having a hard time right now. Everyone feels this way. Sometimes I will be kind to myself in this moment. I will give myself the compassion I need.’ And I love that one. When I’m having a particularly hard day, I just start crying. And I put that meditation on. And then the other one that I like that’s less meditative, it’s more very guided, is Sarah Blondin, B-L-O-N-D-I-N, Practicing Gentle Kindness Toward Ourselves. And that’s a 10-minute one. So I would say those are probably some of my top four favorites that I interchange regularly, though I do have other ones that I love as well.

Sarah E. Brown 24:49

And the location of this is insighttimer.com?

Jennifer Hill 24:52

Yeah, that’s Insight Timer. And there’s a phenomenal one on Apple Music that I love to use for longer travel trips. Because I travel quite a bit. And so I love to use this one if I’m on planes or trains because I have it downloaded. So if anybody wants to find the one on Apple Music that’s 35 minutes long, it’s called In a Space of Chakra, C-H-A-K-R-A with Lyn Ross, one N, L-Y-N-R-O-S-S, and Christopher Lloyd Clark. And that is, oh my gosh, I have had some of the most profound meditation experiences of my life listening to that. And to a song by Estas Tonne. That’s a meditative song. It’s really good for meditation or dancing. EstasnTone has a song called Inner Worlds. It’s 22 minutes, so probably dead sober. The most profound visions I’ve ever had have been to the inner space of chakra and to Estas Tonne, listening to both of those, I’ve just had some really deep wisdom come to me.

Sarah E. Brown 25:52

One of the things you shared with me before when we were talking about this interview was that you believe it’s very helpful in building resiliency. Say a little bit more about that.

Jennifer Hill 26:03

So resilience is our capacity to bounce back after we’ve been through an upset, a trauma, any sort of obstacle or challenge in our day or life. So let’s imagine for a moment that I haven’t meditated and I haven’t done heart-focused breathing or box breathing or anything to call my nervous system that day. There’s three parts to our brain. There’s our amygdala, which is the lowest part of the brain, the reptilian brain. There’s a mid part of the brain, which is the limbic part of the brain, am I safe? Are you like me? And then there’s the prefrontal cortex and the neocortex, which is our higher brain function, which allows us to make executive decisions, creative thinking, et cetera. What most people don’t know, Sarah, is that our higher brain can’t function until our lower brain first feels safe. So if I haven’t done anything, and I’m a huge fan of all these techniques, meditation, mindfulness, chanting, heart focus, breathing, the lis inner child work, all of these things are going to get you to the same end result, which is greater resilience.

And to me, what resilience is quieting that fight or flight brain and giving ourselves access again to our higher brain function, to be able to be more present. Now, if I haven’t done any of those things, then the likelihood that I’m going to go into my reptilian brain is much higher. They’ve scientifically studied this. Even our heart rate HeartMath did a really great research and study with police officers and firefighters where they started teaching heart-focused breathing, which you can do with your eyes open. You don’t even have to, some people are like, well, I’m upset, or I’m angry with my partner, my kids, my colleagues. I love heart-focused breathing because you don’t even have to shut your eyes. I was in a recent upset with somebody on a call, and I literally put myself, I felt my animalistic brain starting to kick in. And rather than getting upset, I did heart-focused breathing while I was in the middle of the upset, while my eyes were open and nobody on the call even knew it and I didn’t get upset. And we came to a beautiful resolution rather than having it be a huge mess.

Sarah E. Brown 28:12

So I’m hoping that everybody who’s listening here is getting a real sense of the power of meditation and what it can do for their own lives. But if you, I’m just thinking about my typical listener who is a senior female executive who is running at 10,000 miles an hour and doesn’t have a single second during the day. How do I get started?

Jennifer Hill 28:42

Great question. My recommendation, this is a quick and easy thing that most of us can do no matter how busy we are. I am often on 12 calls a day. Like I’m not exaggerating. 12 calls is the average amount of calls that I have in a day. And one thing that we can all do, even if we have no time, is carve 30 seconds to one minute before every call. All it requires is getting off your prior call one minute earlier. Most of us can do that and say, we need to pee break, or whatever it is. But just getting off that call 30 seconds to one minute before the next call, and then focus your attention in the area of your heart or chest with your eyes open. You can even do this, imagine your breath is flowing in and out right through the center of your heart or chest.

See if you can breathe a little slower and a little deeper than usual. Doing that for stage five to 10 times. So that would be, if you’re breathing into the count of five and out to the count of five, you will slow down your nervous system and quiet that animalistic mind. I encourage you, ladies, maybe I’m asking a lot, if you do it before each call, do it before one call a day for the next week, and just see if you can make a mental note down on a scale of one to five, five you’re feeling amazing, one, you’re feeling completely depleted. Just make a quick little note. How were you feeling before the one minute of heart-focused breathing? How were you feeling after? And then if you like it, try and see if you can integrate it into every single call that you do.

Google’s Aristotle Project that was done in 2012 studied 38,000 people, I think, and hundreds of teens. And what Google was most interested in was what has teens be successful and what they found astonished them. It was not people of the same age or race or socioeconomic status or those who went out for drinks. It was, Sarah, the people who felt most psychologically safe. And if I’m in an incoherent way, if I’ve been racing from one call to another, that’s going to create a physiological response in myself that you are then going to have a physiological response to as the next person who I’m getting on a call with. HeartMath did another really fun study where they took 40 people, 10 groups of four, and each of those groups of four, three people were trained in this heart-focused breathing. One person was not the one person who was brought into each of these groups where they didn’t know what they were studying. And the other three people knew that they were meant to do the heart-focused breathing. The fourth person who was not trained in it became coherent physiologically every time. And that’s safety. Could you imagine if we could offer that to all of our teams?

Sarah E. Brown 31:26

Wow. That is amazing. Do you believe that people need to get professional help to learn how to meditate?

Jennifer Hill 31:33

I would say it’s on an individual by individual basis. I think some people like to have facts like, okay, to give you an OptiMatch thing. There are several different types of motivators that we look at when we’re doing our Opti Match survey. One type is people who we call apples. Apples love facts and information. If you are somebody who you know that you appreciate having like linear, factual ways to do things, by all means go get yourself support to get trained in meditation. Because how you learn, you are going to be more receptive when you have facts, when you understand the methodology. My Apple friends who I love and adore, they would hate meditating if they didn’t have a complete understanding of the benefits, how to do it, why to do it, the exact date and time to do it. But that might be very different for some of you ladies out there who might be more the really driven type.

I’m more of what’s called a light sheet, where we like to do things down and dirty and fast. And for me, I’d always resisted teachers for many years because I am more of somebody who likes to teach myself something. So there are many people who go out and still train with meditation teachers. I just did that one training with transcendental meditation 11 years ago, and I’ve kept myself going and going and going since then. Then you have other types of people that are going to be, might need more hand holding or might need more interaction with other people. So we all learn differently. And I wouldn’t say it’s one size fits all, Sarah. I would say to honor yourself and just ask yourself, am I somebody who needs a lot of facts and info? If so, then go find a great teacher. TM is a great resource.

There are many wonderful YouTube channels and things out there. If you’re somebody like me who’s more self-taught, then maybe just go out there and find some of your favorite meditations on Insight Timer, Headspace, YouTube, I have some of my other favorite meditations on a website I created called 101spiritualtools.com. If you go to the blog section, it’s a link to all the resources in a book I wrote a couple years ago. And it has a whole section on some of my other favorite meditations in there. And you can teach yourself. So it just depends on how you learn best.

Sarah E. Brown 33:46

I got it. So Jennifer, is there a question that I should have asked you that I didn’t to help listeners understand the power of meditation and to really get inspired to try it?

Jennifer Hill 33:58

I think the only other question, Sarah, that could be answered here is how to cultivate compassion. I know as women executives, many of you listen out, there are leaders and you’re trying to manage a life and in some cases a family and a business. Be compassionate with yourself and be thoughtful of not shoulding on yourself. If you leave this podcast today and you say, I should meditate, Jennifer and Sarah just said, I should. No, don’t do it. Wait, I don’t care if you wait a decade to do it. It’s not the right time. If you can shift the should from should to, oh, I could. Wow! That really piqued my interest. Do it from a place of openness and curiosity and not from another box to check. Because otherwise it’s the way we approach something. If we have it that we should do it, we’re going to create resistance to it.

And in fact, I’ll give you a funny little tidbit here from Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, brilliant book. Many people don’t remember this part of the book, but he talks about paradoxical thinking. So he shares in the book that he had a client, a patient who sweated a lot and was always embarrassed because he was going out and sweating. So part of Victor’s logotherapy, which is a therapy form that he came up with is called Paradoxical Thinking. So he teaches his patient, instead of going out there and saying, oh God, I hope I don’t sweat. I hope I don’t sweat. I hope I don’t sweat. He tells his patient, I hope I sweat so much that I walk around with buckets behind me. I hope I sweat so much that there’s a river. And the funny thing is, the patient never sweats again.

Well, this can be applied in many areas of our life. It has changed my life from a sleep standpoint. As an executive, I would often wake up in the middle of the night ruminating, unable to go back to sleep. Even meditation sometimes wouldn’t help me. But this little thing of saying, I hope I never go back to sleep again. I hope I stay awake for the next three years. I hope I’m awake the next 42 hours, whatever it is, oftentimes dropping the resistance that I should do it. I should meditate. I shouldn’t sweat. I should go back to sleep. We’re going to create resistance between ourselves and the thing when we can drop it and just kind of play with it and embrace it. I’ve been sleeping better in the middle of the night than I’ve ever slept before.

Sarah E. Brown 36:13

Interesting. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for being with me today. This has been a great conversation.

Jennifer Hill 36:21

Thank you, Sarah. And thank you to your listeners.

Sarah E. Brown 36:24

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes, and learn more about our podcast guests. Read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown