A muzzle flash and a burst of fire. I recognised the sound of the belt fed machine gun and wheeled left at the interruption to the stillness of dawn. Almost by instinct, the rifle came up to my shoulder and I knelt.
I resisted the urge to squeeze off haphazard shots and stilled myself. My elbow rested on my knee to create stability throughout my body. Weight grounded and stable. As I looked through the crosshairs of my sights unit, movement in the shrub caught my eye. I flicked off the safety and my finger took up the tension of the trigger.
Not yet… a glimpse of the target… still not yet… was that a boot?
Until this point I had always wondered if you’d ever know if you’d actually shot your target. I’d heard stories from friends who had deployed to Afghanistan. There were so many of you firing at so many targets so far away that you’d never know if your rounds found their target or not.
More to the point, every time I had fired a rifle at moving targets in training, I had been filled with panic, stress, and a lack of skill. I was spraying haphazardly.
Now though, I took my time. I calmed myself as I scanned the small area around the initial muzzle flash. Then I saw him. He’d moved 25m without me seeing, but I had a straight shot.
The crosshairs lined up in the centre of his chest, and I fired 3 rounds. I was certain he would fall. I knew I had hit him.
Yet somehow he didn’t fall.
When I was in training, part of me knew I was just outside Portsmouth. Another part was convinced I was really at war. Of course he didn’t fall. We were firing blanks in our final exercise before the tests that would give me my green beret.
Still though, I learned a lesson that would stay with me for years and that would help the thousand plus clients I have served.
I’d found the power of stillness. Stillness is what allowed me to be certain I had hit the target. And stillness is what so many freedom seeking business owners are desperately lacking.
The Hidden Costs of Constant Hustle in the First Years of Business
The first few years of running a business, especially a small business, are dominated by the owner doing everything at all times. They are haphazard, and just like me in the early days of my training, essentially spraying wild bursts of fire from the hip.
They’re half way through writing a social media post when they pick up a client call. As that call finishes, their partner texts and reminds them to sort the shopping out for that night. They eventually work on their big project for twenty minutes before getting distracted on their phone, and then another ‘urgent’ call. Any moments of quiet are filled with airpods in, listening to a podcast; consuming constantly. This happens for 14 hours a day.
It’s not only their physical actions that are rushed. Their mental state too jumps from place to place. Emotions cycle through anxiety, excitement, joy, fear, hope, and everything else in a short period. Their thoughts are all over the place.
They long for a 3 hour block of no distractions so they can focus on what’s important. Urgency is their dominant state. They’ve got 10 targets in front of them and they want to hit all of them right now. They have to hit all targets right now.
The hope is that when they get to an elusive next level, then they can put some pauses in their day and gather their thoughts. The truth says differently to their hopes: until they create stillness, they will not hit their next level.
The early stage entrepreneur is right to rush. You need to iterate quickly and you don’t know enough to know what will work. Once you’ve got even a modicum of success though, direction is what’s key.
The Power of Precision: How Stillness Can Transform Your Business Strategy
Eventually, a business owner has to start aiming more carefully; just like a soldier stilling the mind and body, taking a breath, and squeezing the trigger so delicately that the shot firing actually surprises him.
Finding stillness allows the thoughts to dissipate. Stillness allows the body to rid itself of whatever it's holding onto. Stillness allows you to aim precisely with your shots, and hit your highest value targets.
For the business owner, the fear is that if you get still, then you’ll run out of time, you’ll miss opportunities, and you’ll screw up. Frenetic activity - the opposite of stillness - comes from this fear and is born from scarcity. Scarcity says “there isn’t enough time, there isn’t enough money and there isn’t enough of anything…so fight tooth and nail for what you can grab.”
The thing about urgency is that it’s self-perpetuating. The more you rush, the more you feel like you need to rush. It has an energy to it that’s addictive. In fact, cortisol floods your system and becomes relied upon. We know that cortisol reduces your ability to think clearly and form memories. Cortisol is produced when we encounter situations that scare us.
Urgency, scarcity, and rushing burn business owners out. Scarcity hates stillness. Stillness is the antidote to scarcity. Stillness creates a mind that works for you.
For the soldier, stillness means being vulnerable. It’s harder to hit a moving target.
Just like the soldier lining up a shot in a warzone, it takes courage and self-trust to take a knee, pause for a moment, breathe, line up your shot, and take it. Similarly, it takes courage and self-trust, to take twenty minutes before your work day to still your mind with meditation, pull out your journal to self-reflect, and isolate your 2 essential tasks for the day. It takes even more courage and self-trust to put your phone in another room and only do what you need to do, and not a drop more; to recover and recuperate.
As you move throughout the entrepreneurial world, growth is about leveraging your time and effort. Freneticism is focused on the small, ambiguous, immediate and urgent. Stillness is focused on the high-leverage, high-reward, and long-term.
Success is built through a still mind. So too, is optimal mental performance.
6 Proven Techniques to Cultivate Stillness in Both Body and Mind
We’re looking to train stillness in two areas: stillness of the body, and stillness of the mind. Start with the body first. I’ve found with my clients that few are cut out for going straight to the mind.
The first tool I try with my clients is Non-Sleep Deep Rest. This is essentially a relaxation protocol with a form of body scan embedded. Andrew Huberman has popularised this in recent times. You find a guided track, on YouTube for example, lay down, and for ten minutes, calm your body. I also cover this in depth in my new Calm Course.
The next tool is counter intuitive: move. Specifically, take your headphones out, jump on a bike or don your running shoes. Do some steady, slow cardio for an hour or more. You reach a point 40 minutes in where your subconscious suggests things into the space you’ve created with a lack of stimulation.
Breathwork is another awesome tool. Your conscious state has physical roots. Soon I’ll be releasing an episode of The Freedom Project where I discuss breathwork with a master coach. The key to down regulating your body through breathwork is to breathe in normally through the nose, and then slow your exhale as much as possible without the need to urgently breathe back in.
Fourth, try cold exposure. One of my clients right now has found amazing physical and mental stillness with a daily cold exposure routine. He jumps in a cold shower, and immediately knows that the only way he’s going to stay in there for the prescribed duration is to watch his thoughts and not get distracted. This forces stillness and singular focus of the mind. Interestingly when you do cold exposure, there’s a spike of dopamine (your goal pursuit hormone) that’s higher than if you took a line of cocaine. This makes your goal pursuit singular and intentional.
Next up, the big dog: meditation. Again, this is something I cover in one of my courses, this time the Clarity Course. But Sam Harris’ app, Waking Up, is also fantastic for learning meditation. Meditation forces you to confront your mental state and sit with it. With practice, you can learn to observe that state without being synonymous with it. Meditation is a tool that everyone should find a way to use as its benefits are far more than psychological.
Free Journaling is another great tool to use if you seek stillness. Simply open a journal and write whatever comes to mind. This will be cathartic for most, uncomfortable sometimes too, but mostly cathartic. If you write freely and do not sound like you should be committed to an asylum when you read it back, you’re too in control. Just let it out and purge your mind of the repetitive loops. This is also a great way to pick up on stories you tell yourself.
Achieve Deep Calm and Clarity: The Essential Steps to Elevate Your Business Performance
To summarise:
Stillness is a superpower that allows you to aim your efforts precisely
Level 1 of entrepreneurship is frenetic action. Level 2 is precise iteration.
Use physiological tools first to create stillness.
Next up, look to psychological tools to find a deeper level of clarity and calm
If you want to create a deep calm that allows for your next level of operation, try my Calm course, or my Clarity course.
Comments