In our last several +1s, we’ve been spending some time with Sam Walker, mining wisdom from his great book, The Captain Class.
As you may recall, we started by establishing the fact that, in his opinion, THE #1 thing that made the historically great teams great was their CAPTAIN. Then we talked about the 7 qualities of elite captains, then we talked about the first quality: EXTREME DOGGEDNESS!
Today I want to chat about how to train resilience and forge the seventh quality of those elite captains: IRONCLAD EMOTIONAL CONTROL.
Let’s get straight to work.
Sam tells us: “After meeting with the Dalai Lama in India in 1992, [Richard] Davidson decided to turn his attention to a more practical question. He wanted to know whether people could train themselves to be more resilient. Over the years, Davidson had become a strong believer in the concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that people’s brains change over time and that those changes can depend on their life’s circumstances. For most of us, this transformation happens unwittingly, at a level below consciousness. What Davidson wanted to know was whether people could make positive changes intentionally.”
He continues by saying: “He set out to explore a theory he’d long suspected to be true—that meditation, especially the long, grueling kind that Buddhist monks engaged in, might cause this kind of brain rewiring to occur. Are people who meditate better at recovering from adversity?”
That’s from a chapter called “The Kill Switch: Regulating Emotion.”
As you may know, Richie Davidson is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists.
In fact, he founded two fields that have greatly shaped our understanding of what it means to live optimally: affective neuroscience (the study of the brain basis of human emotion) AND contemplative neuroscience (the study of the effects of meditation on the brain).
As we discuss in our Notes on his great book The Emotional Life of Your Brain (check those out!), Richie is the guy who first approached the Dalai Lama about studying the brains of experienced meditators.
And, fun fact: Matthieu Ricard’s brain was first studied in his lab. (Check out our Notes on HIS great book called Why Meditate?)
Here’s the VERY short story on what you need to know.
Meditation ABSOLUTELY helps you cultivate resilience.
People who *don’t* meditate, tend to respond more significantly to life’s stressors and recover less quickly.
Therefore…
If YOU would like to forge some IRONCLAD EMOTIONAL CONTROL to go along with your antifragile confidence, you’d be (very) wise to train your ability to put your mind where you want, when you want, for how long you want.
In other words, you’d be wise to Meditate.
P.S. Check out Meditation 101 for more on how and why and all that.
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