Below is Part 1 of a three-part series of articles I wrote for Poets & Quants, the premier website destination for MBA applicants. While this article was written with MBA applicants in mind, it is relevant to all business professionals.

“I’ve still got to deal with 100 emails, finalize those two PowerPoints, read and be able to speak intelligibly about this 150-page report by this afternoon’s meeting. I can’t believe I just lost about 20 minutes web surfing. I also have only three weeks left till I take the GMAT, and I’ve barely had time to study. I’d hoped to this weekend, but now it looks like I might be called in to work on an emergency project. When am I going to even think about doing the essays? And what if I don’t get into any of my target schools? Even if I do, I’m really anxious about having to take on even more student loans. I mean, what if I do that and can’t find a job after I graduate?”

You reach for your third 5-Hour Energy Drink of the day, hoping it’ll keep you focused and energized, and knowing you’ll need a beer or two (or three) to get to sleep. This has become a daily routine. You fleetingly wonder if this is affecting your body, but what are your options?

“And I don’t know what to make of that last review. Analytical skills, top 5%; emotional intelligence, needs a lot of work. How is that going to affect my B-school recommendations? Apparently, I’m not managing my anger and stress very well, and I’m ‘out of touch’ with my teammates. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“I don’t even know what the face of business is going to be in three years, once I graduate. Everything is changing so fast; creative destruction is becoming commonplace, making innovation critical; developing economies keep creating upheaval in the competitive landscape; and climate change may prove to have devastating effects. How am I going to deal with all of this uncertainty and change? It’s hard just to keep up; I feel like I’d have to be a superhero to successfully tackle what’s ahead.”

Coming Back to the Present Moment
Stop for a second to see how you feel after reading the above. Perhaps your stomach has slightly tightened, your breathing has gotten a bit shallower, your heartbeat has picked up. What else do you notice? Take a few moments to investigate. Now feel yourself sitting in your chair and take a few deep breaths, becoming aware of what it feels like to inhale and exhale with each breath . . . and coming back to your present-moment experience.

As you just saw in the example above, so often our mind is way ahead of us in the future, planning or worrying away, or way behind us, ruminating about the past, but it’s rarely in synch with our body, which is where our life actually takes place.

What if there were practices you could do that would not only help you alleviate the stress of daily living, but that would also help you cultivate key leadership competencies you need to succeed in the 21st century—e.g.,  the ability to navigate uncertainty, agility, resilience, emotional intelligence, empathy, and innovativeness? They already exist. Millions have benefited from mind training for millennia, and today’s neuroscientists are finding that contemplative practices such as mindfulness meditation alter the brain’s structures and functions in ways that promote all of the above. You got a taste of one such practice when you stopped the freight train of nonstop thoughts above, checking in to see how you were feeling and tuning in to your breathing.

Before we proceed, let me define “mindfulness,” a word you’ll encounter repeatedly in this three-part series: the art of paying attention to present-moment experience in a kind, open, and curious way. Why would we want to pay attention to the present moment? Because this is where the juice, the possibility for connection, and the joy of feeling alive are available. Moreover, the present moment is where we can take effective action. Rather that unconsciously reacting to external stimuli via our (often maladaptive) habit patterns, when we come into the present moment, we have the opportunity respond to situations wisely and compassionately. Consider martial artists, who have trained for countless hours to be 100% present and attuned to their environment. Being attacked on all sides by numerous enemies wielding swords, lances, arrows, guns, and hands that have been registered as lethal weapons, martial artists seem suspended in time, effortlessly and gracefully responding to each attack. While engaging in mind training like mindfulness meditation is unlikely to make a Bruce Lee or Marvel Comics hero out of you, it will allow you to move through life’s inevitable stresses and challenges with greater skill and ease.

Train Your Mind, Improve Your Game: Notes from the Field
One of my favorite anecdotes regarding how mind training can enhance leadership capabilities comes from the military. While military training in the West had traditionally emphasized a strict chain-of-command structure, by the mid-1980s, this began to break down. Thanks to the introduction of smart technologies that provided frontline troops real-time information, soldiers were making immediate decisions instead of awaiting instructions from headquarters. Consequently, the military needed to train soldiers to become more thoughtful, resourceful, and intuitive. Fighting guerillas also demanded a new set of skills, including winning the hearts and minds of locals rather than relying on an overwhelming use of force. These soldiers needed to be more sensitive and flexible, and needed to inspire trust. From this the Trojan Warrior Project was born. Leadership trainer Richard Strozzi-Heckler, PhD, led 25 Green Berets through a six-month training in martial arts, meditation, biofeedback, guided relaxation, and mind-body psychology. The physiological results were off the charts: participants improved by between 50% and 150% in their ability to control pain and body temperature, remain alert and motionless for significant periods, and recuperate from injury and stress. They also made significant gains in flexibility, physical endurance, coordination, and team cohesion. These soldiers also demonstrably enhanced their leadership abilities, as evidenced by the 1993 battle in Mogadishu in Somalia. According to Strozzi-Heckler, “The soldiers who’d been through the program had learned to carry themselves in a way that inspired greater confidence and trust. Because they were calmer, they were much better in a crisis. Because they had more awareness of what triggered their aggression, they took more responsibility for their actions. Plus, they were far more attuned to what other people were thinking and feeling. All these changes translated into a leadership presence.”

Sports teams like the Chicago Bulls in the ’90s and the LA Lakers in the ’00s have also leveraged mind training to become top in their games. Their winning coach, Phil Jackson, brought in meditation instructor George Mumford to systematically train his teams to get in the zone. Jackson notes in his book, Sacred Hoops, “In basketball—as in life—true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way. Of course, it’s no accident that things are more likely to go your way when you stop worrying about whether you’re going to win or lose and focus your attention on what’s happening right this moment.”

So here we have some elite performers who have taken their “game” to a new level by doing contemplative practices such as meditation. What about those whose standard-issue uniform is a suit or a hoodie? Do we have any examples from those camps? Most people know that Steve Jobs practiced Zen-style meditation on and off throughout his career, but did you know that billionaire Bridgewater Associates hedge fund manager and Harvard MBA Ray Dallio meditates? He observes, “I notice a difference from the moment I meditate. I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.” Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, began meditating to alleviate stress. Another innovative practitioner is Alex Bogusky, former advertising wunderkind and founder of Fearless Revolution, a movement through which he is empowering citizens to become more conscious consumers and helping companies become more socially responsible. Michael Stephen, former Aetna International chairman, began meditating in 1974 and says it helped him transform from “an impatient, demanding know-it-all into a more effective leader.” Believe it or not, there are some meditators on Capitol Hill. I recently saw Rep. Tim Ryan from Ohio speak about his new book, A Mindful Nation. One of meditation’s most visible proponents is Bill George, former Medtronic CEO, Goldman Sachs board member, and Harvard Business School professor who spearheaded the Mindful Leader conference in 2010. George started to meditate for 20 minutes twice a day almost forty years ago. Regarding meditation, he notes, “Out of anything, it has had the greatest positive impact on my career.” He claims that meditation practice has been “the single best thing that happened to me in terms of my leadership.” (To learn more, read this  September 7, 2010, interview he gave on mindful leadership on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge website.)

An increasing number of blue-chip and innovative companies have been offering meditation training to employees, including Apple, Genentech, McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, Intel, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Medtronic, Raytheon, Unilever, Comcast, and the New York Times. Google has perhaps made the greatest splash with its Search Inside Yourself (SIY) program, which blends the latest research in neuroscience with mindfulness practices to help employees increase their emotional intelligence. Since the program’s launch in 2007, one thousand Google employees have participated in the seven-week course. In April 2012, SIY’s champion, Chade-Meng Tan, released his book, Search Inside Yourself; and launched the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI), through which he intends to offer the course to the public and organizations. According to the SIYLI website, “Our vision is to help develop leaders who are on the cutting edge of changing how the world does business, how people solve problems; the world of technology, finance, manufacturing, health care, education, government. We bring people together to think differently, to act differently, to collaborate and innovate to solve real problems.” (Read more about this program on the Knowledge@Wharton website.)

Prominent law schools such as Harvard, Yale, and UC-Berkeley have offered meditation training, often tied to their mediation and negotiation curricula. Several business schools, including Wharton, Kellogg, Columbia, and INSEAD have dabbled with offering instruction, but I’m not aware of any MBA programs that offer it as an ongoing elective. (This is something I hope to change.) Student interest is growing, however, and related clubs have been sprouting up on campuses. I was delighted to learn about the grassroots efforts of two HBS second-years, Nikita Singhal and Suken Vakil, who undertook an independent project this past spring regarding meditation and leadership, and who made meditation training available to classmates. You can view the results of their research project here.

For the empiricists amongst you, I know anecdotes aren’t enough. You’ll be happy to know that over the last few decades scientists have been studying the effects of contemplative practices such as meditation on the body and mind. While the field is nascent and many studies undertaken to date have been small scale or preliminary, the results have been quite promising.

In each article in this three-part series, I’ll be sharing research findings, offering instructions for formal meditation practice, outlining informal mindfulness practices, and sharing resources for learning more. In this installment, I’ll be covering how these practices affect the body; in the next , the intellect/cognition; and in the final, the emotions. In truth, these distinctions are somewhat artificial since the body, mind, and emotions are interconnected, and every practice offered will affect all three, but this breakdown will make the material easier to digest.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to come back to ourselves and the present moment. One way to do this is to use our senses. Let’s try touch first. Can you feel how your body is making contact with your chair, for instance? Notice your feet on the floor. What do your clothes feel like on your body? Now take a moment to take in your environment visually. Employing a soft gaze, let the world around you come to your eyes. Be curious about what you might observe, even if you’re very familiar with your setting. How about hearing? What sorts of sounds are arising around you? Maybe you hear the hum of the lights overhead, a bird outside, a ticking clock, or the sound of your own breathing. Can you smell anything? Food? Flowers? Someone’s perfume or cologne? Tasting might be a bit more difficult if you don’t have some food on hand, but maybe you just popped an Altoid or just took a sip of your latte, and your taste buds have some stimulation. After you have taken this little tour of your senses, check in with yourself and see how you feel.

What Scientists Have to Say about Meditation
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, two-thirds of all doctor’s-office visits are for stress-related ailments, and OSHA estimates that stress costs American industry more than $300 billion  per year. While it’s actually healthy for us to experience occasional stress (this means we’re alive and engaged in our world), when stress becomes chronic and your body is constantly awash with stress hormones, you’re more likely to succumb to a number of conditions, such as high blood pressure, headaches, diabetes, skin conditions, asthma, arthritis, and anxiety. To deal , like many others, you may turn to maladaptive coping strategies. For example, you may feel so revved up that you overwork or otherwise keep constantly busy because you can’t find the off switch. Or you may excessively turn to substances such as alcohol or drugs to calm yourself down. Or you may tire yourself out so much that you resort to stimulants such coffee or sugar to pick yourself back up again. Relying on these things in excess further taxes your body and can lead to breakdown, whether through adrenal exhaustion, loss of drive and enthusiasm, depression, heart attack, or cancer.

This may sound like a downer, but don’t despair! Numerous studies have shown that meditation, particularly through its promotion of the relaxation response, can help alleviate stress-related ailments and prevent them in the first place. One study  that you aspiring MBA students might appreciate tracked a group of students at Dalian University of Technology in China who were randomly assigned to 40-person experimental or control groups. The experimental group received five days of meditation training while the control group underwent five days of relaxation training. The meditators showed greater improvement than the mere relaxers in an attention test designed to measure the subjects’ abilities to resolve conflict among stimuli. Study participants also had to take a stressful math test (does that sound familiar?). Both groups initially showed an elevated release of the stress hormone cortisol following the math task, but after practicing meditation, the meditators released less cortisol, indicating a greater improvement in stress regulation. The meditators also recorded lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue; and greater vigor than the relaxers. Consider doing yourself a favor and learning to meditate so you can glide through your GMAT and MBA coursework.

The research suggests that meditating can also

•    Reduce chronic pain
•    Reduce cholesterol levels
•    Reduce cardiac events
•    Boost the immune response
•    Improve sleep
•    Increase energy
•    Reduce the time (and therefore the cost) to treat psoriasis.

You may find one of the studies performed regarding the immune response of interest because it involved ordinary working people at a biotech company called Promega. Twenty-five employees met for three hours once a week for eight weeks following the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) curriculum. They were also asked to practice one hour a day, six days a week, at home. In addition to studying meditation’s effect on the brain, the research team also tested whether the meditators had better immune function than the control group. All study participants got a flu shot at the end of the eight-week course. Four and eight weeks after vaccination, the meditators had a significantly larger increase in antibodies than the control group.

And what if you could radically shorten the length of treatment for a health condition (saving time, resources, and money) by simply meditating? If you have psoriasis, you’re in luck. Two studies employing the MBSR curriculum have addressed this condition. In both cases, both the meditating groups and the control groups, who had moderate to severe psoriasis, received standard light-therapy treatments, but the meditators listened to mindfulness-meditation instructions during their treatments while the control group did not. On average, the meditators needed one-fourth the number of treatments the control group required to heal their psoriasis. When I see data like this and think about spiraling healthcare costs, I get excited thinking that meditation may help us tackle this behemoth.

I’m adding this final potential physiological benefit only because it would be very cool if future studies confirm it. It’s quite possible that meditating slows down the aging process. In examining the thickness of prefrontal cortexes of the long-term meditators (an average of nine years of practice) vs. the non-meditators in the study, Harvard Medical School’s Sara Lazar found that the long-term meditators had less cortical thinning (linked to cognitive decline) than non-meditators their own age. In fact, their cortical thickness was more in line with non-meditators who were in their 20s and 30s. Another study has examined the link between meditation, the generation of telomerase, and the aging process.  I like to think that after all the practice I’ve done, I’ve got the brain of a 26-year-old myself!

So How Do I Do This?
In this installment, I’m going to give you instructions for a practice called a body-scan, which will serve as a good warm-up for the more standard meditation practice that I’ll share in my next article in this series. The body-scan is the foundational practice in the highly effective MBSR curriculum, and it provides a very structured way to begin to cultivate your attention, awareness, and presence. Click here to find two audio files that will guide you through the practice: one that runs 15 for minutes for when you don’t have much time and one that runs for y minutes, which you can do when you really want to let go and luxuriate a bit. For this practice, you’re invited to lie down on a very comfortable surface, though if you do so, the risk of falling asleep is quite high! One way to prevent that is to keep your eyes open during the process. You can also do this sitting up. Please choose a time and place to do this such that you won’t be interrupted. I’ll be giving you detailed instructions in the audio files, but essentially, what you’ll be doing is systematically bringing attention to a part of your body, sensing it from the inside to see what’s there to be experienced, then moving your attention to the next body part I mention. You may feel anything: tingling, itching, heat, cold, pain, pleasure, waves of relaxation, or even numbness. All of this is perfectly okay because it’s exactly what’s going on! I invite you to observe what you’re noticing with a spirit of curiosity and allow judgments (“This feeling must be wrong” or “I don’t like this feeling, but I really like this other one”), should they arise, to just pass by in your mind. Through this exercise, we’re training ourselves to notice what is, whatever it is, here and now. When your attention wanders, as it surely will, just gently bring it back to whatever part of the body the recording is guiding you to pay attention to. This way, you’re training yourself to focus.

Practicing Mindfulness Throughout the Day
The body-scan is what I call a “formal” practice—something that you sit or lie down to do for an extended period of time. You can also develop your mindfulness muscle by doing “informal” practices during the course of your day. I already led you through two above—stopping to take a few deep breaths and notice how you feel in your body, and taking a moment to check in with all of your senses. Notice how both of these (and much of what I have to share with you) involves sensing in your body. This is because while your mind may be in the past or future, your body actually resides in the here and now, where you’ll be way more effective and satisfied. I invite you to experiment with these two exercises throughout your day. You may choose to set a timer on your phone or computer—say once an hour—to prompt you to do them. Or stick a Post-It on your monitor or bathroom mirror at home to remind you. Or you may just do them spontaneously when they come to mind. These informal practices are very important. It would be easy to do your 15–20-minute meditation each morning and then go on automatic pilot for the rest of the day, not really integrating what you’re doing in longer practice periods into the rest of daily life, which is where you spend most of your time! You’ll greatly amplify the benefits of formal practice by doing informal practices.

Here are two more informal practices you can try this week.

First, periodically check in to feel your center of gravity, which is located in your abdomen, about two inches below your navel. Try it right now. Notice how this brings your energy and attention down from your head, helping you to get in touch with the rest of yourself. You may notice that doing so feels grounding and empowering, and your mind quiets down. You can do this while sitting still at your desk or in a meeting, but it’s also useful to play with while you’re moving; in fact, see what it feels like to initiate your movements from this part of your body. If you’re walking, for example, lead with your center of gravity and have your legs follow.

I also invite you to pay attention to the sensations of and your reactions to heat and cold. Before immediately cranking up the air conditioner or putting your jacket on, check in to see what you’re feeling. What are the actual sensations? Where do you feel them in your body? What thoughts and feelings are arising that are associated with this experience? Are they strong or mild? Return to your sensations. Have they changed? Take some time to be curious about your experience of heat or cold (and do feel free to warm or cool yourself as need be when you’ve finished your exploration).

I’m offering this exercise because unpleasant experiences are inevitable in life, but how we respond to them is up to us. We can make things a lot worse when we push away and react to our experience; when we take a closer look at what we’re actually experiencing (vs. believing thoughts about it such as “I can’t stand this; I have to fix this right now!”), we see that it’s actually bearable and it may not even be as unpleasant as we imagined. This does take practice, however. That’s why I’m having you start with something relatively simple. Truly effective leaders are fully engaged with their world, willing to face inconvenient or painful truths and take sometimes challenging but necessary actions to serve the greater good. Learning to become comfortable with being uncomfortable will give you much more latitude in which to operate and will allow you to have a much greater impact as a leader.

Let’s Create a Learning Lab
I’d like to create a learning lab where we can share what we discover as we engage in these practices, so I invite you to post your experiences and questions below. If you’d like to learn more about meditation and conscious leadership, click here. I provide individual and group instruction and coaching, and I can also point you to numerous resources.

Recommended Reading:
Full-Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD
The Leadership Dojo: Build Your Foundation as an Exemplary Leader, Richard Strozzi-Heckler, PhD
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), Chade-Meng Tan
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD