http://www.fastcompany.com/3044344/agendas/the-business-case-for-meditation
BY
DAVID ZAX
HOW
MINDFULNESS TRAINING HELPS SOFTWARE COMPANY YESWARE "BE MORE EFFECTIVE,
BUILD BETTER SOFTWARE, (AND) SELL MORE OF IT."
Matthew Bellows dropped
out of Brown his sophomore year in 1988. His father had gone to Brown; Bellows
had a rebellious streak, and this was his rebellion. Bellows wandered the
country and wound up living in an intentional community north of Phoenix called
Arcosanti. He stayed about a year. He calls this his skirt-wearing, hippy,
commune-dwelling phase. He looks back on it with mixed feelings: "I was
struggling, I was being . . . but I wasn’t really growing up," he says.
Bellows soon
learned about another groovy-sounding place: Naropa
University in Boulder, Colorado, which had been founded by a Tibetan
meditation master. Bellows enrolled, and began a sitting meditation practice.
Soon after, he decided to deepen that practice at another Colorado institution
called theShambhala Mountain Center. "That was the year where I
really feel like I grew up," he says. "I became an adult there."
He spent
between 4 and 12 hours a day meditating. He sat on a cushion, legs loosely
crossed, and focused on his breathing. Sometimes—oftentimes—his mind would
wander; he’d get swept up in thoughts—on conflict with his parents, or how a
girlfriend had wronged him. Catching himself, he’d simply think the word,
"thinking," and then imagine bursting those thoughts, gently, like a
feather might pop a bubble.
"There’s
nothing like sitting in a room, doing nothing for hours on end, for you to get
to know your mind," says Bellows. "You start to get your patterns of
thought, you have time to think about what your life is about, and what you
want your life to be. And a strange ambition awoke in me during that year—the
desire to accomplish something with my life."
Though
meditation, Bellows discovered that, at heart, he was an entrepreneur.
He moved to
the Boston area, took out a phone book, and cold-called computer startups. He
learned a trick: always ask to be connected to investor relations, since
they’ll take any call. Finally, the work paid off, and a startup hired him. And
now, 20 years later, Bellows is CEO of a tech company called Yesware, a digital-sales
toolkit. Ultimately, he says, it was meditation that brought him to this place.
He was disconnected from society: meditation reconnected him.
Meditation
remains a big part of Bellows’s life, he says, and he encourages contemplative
practices—be it meditation, yoga, or something else—at work. Yesware teaches
in-house classes on "mindfulness at work," which he says means
"instead of being swept up in the crazy rush of activities we have,
running from an email to a meeting to the coffeepot and back, we actually
maintain some perspective on the flurry, the rush, and the activity. We’re
still really busy, but we have some sense of perspective on it. We pause, take
a breath, realize we’re alive, we’re human, we have feelings, and we relate
with each other."
But does it
help the bottom line? "Definitely," he says. "We’re a software company,
and software is the most abstract
product in the physical world. Software is a completely creative
thing," and ultimately the best software will be created at a company
whose culture minimizes "stupid meetings, people freaking out, and a toxic
managerial environment." Mindfulness training helps prevent all those
things. "Then people can be more effective, build better software, sell
more of it, and charge more money for it," he says. He is proud that one
of his investors refers to Yesware as "a monastic startup," due to
the contemplative vibe that pervades the place.
Whether or
not meditation is for you—and it’s not for everyone, says Bellows—Bellows
advocates for some form of contemplative practice in your life. "The
reason why it’s good for business people, for people who want to accomplish
things in their lives, is twofold," he says. First, it helps you get to
know your own mind, its habits, its glitches, and whatever is preventing you
from getting to the next level. Secondly, contemplative practice can "help
you navigate your relationship to the world," says Bellows: it gives you
perspective on the ecosystem of partners, customers, suppliers, coworkers,
investors, and bosses, and equips you to navigate these relationships
gracefully.
This is the
bit that might be most surprising about meditation, for those who haven’t tried
it: the notion that it can connect you with others, rather than cause you to
become withdrawn. By observing your own flaws and faults through meditation,
says Bellows, "you suddenly become more connected to other people because you
realize they have flaws and faults, too. You see other people in the street
wrapped up in their thoughts and trapped in their patterns, and you have a
sense of connectedness to them."
