Please see Part 3 of the series here.
As I’ve discussed in my last posts, mindfulness means paying attention to something on purpose and non-judgmentally. When you are mindful, you intentionally place your focus where you want it and tug your attention back to that focal point when in invariably wanders; and you do not bother with judging where your mind drifts to, nor even that you lost focus. In this way, you can mindfully converse with someone, mindfully clean your countertop, mindfully deliver a brilliant presentation to investors, mindfully watch your breath in a mindfulness meditation, or even mindfully move. The agency that being mindful provides, therefore, can create a sense of empowerment and freedom – you can hit pause on intrusive, ruminative, unproductive thoughts and instead focus on exactly what you wish to.
The good news is that we absolutely can be more mindful in all aspects of our lives. The bad news is that our brains actively and systematically work against mindfulness, especially when you lack mindfulness skill. For entrepreneurs, the stakes of mindlessness and automatic, negative thinking are particularly high, and I’ll provide examples of why next. We will use the diagram below to understand where mindfulness fits in the array of thinking styles in which our brains engage. In this post we’ll focus on negative thinking, and in the next post we’ll focus on the positive.
Negative Evolutionary Imperatives of the Mind
The human brain evolved to run certain programs that fulfill its evolutionary destiny: to stay alive and continue the species. You can think of these programs like automatic tendencies of the mind to think in a particular way, given a specific situation, with the intention of keeping you alive and kicking. Because they are automatic, the programs run on their own volition. And these programs take their assignment very, very seriously: they take in the tiniest of perceptions and spin wild, ridiculous stories about how they might harm you.
You can see now already how mindfulness balances these automatic programs because it allows “you” to wrest control from these automatic programs – or, at the very least, mindfulness gives you a vantage point to observe the automatic programs running. It’s a rather dark example, but sometimes I like to think of mindfulness as positioning “me” like one of the Civil War journalists: they would perch on a mount or hill, safely above the battle fray, and watch the two sides war. The journalists’ only job was to watch, carefully and curiously, of course, but not to engage in the chaotic violence themselves.
Now, what actually are these programs that our brains run? Well, first, as seen in the diagram below, these automatically running “life-saving” programs come in two flavors: programs that feel intrinsically good and those that feel intrinsically bad. Unfortunately, the evolutionary imperatives of the brain do not care much for your happiness, so many of us find we spend more time in the “automatic/negative” portion of this chart.
Some of the important negative evolutionary imperatives of the mind include:
- It focuses more on negative aspects of your life rather than the positive. Your brain believes a focus on the negative means that you will work to eliminate things in your life that could shorten your lifespan. For example, you likely automatically focus more on some concerns about your company’s liquidity far more than its debt-to-income ratio – even if objectively you know the later factors much more heavily into evaluation of your important earnings report.
- If that last example sounded conspicuously dreadful – “shortened lifespan” – that’s because the second negative imperative of the human mind is to be just that: dramatic. When your brain creates a lot of drama around something negative in your life, it prompts you to, again, pay attention and hopefully resolve the issue. In this way, your brain might interpret that glance from your co-founder when you posed your new marketing strategy as “oh dear, my co-founder wants to pull out of the company.” Or, your brain may interpret that slight dip in consumer confidence for products like your own as “wake up – nobody cares about what we’re selling!” This drama is an attempt to force you to fix any roadblocks that could stymie your ability to live, even if they are far (far) fetched.
- Your brain not only automatically zeroes in on the negative rather than the positive, it also finds it very challenging to forget negative events. From the vantage point of evolution, imagine (long ago) you ate a berry that made you seriously ill. You are not sure you would survive another poisonous berry. Your brain will remember in exquisite detail everything about the berry and the experience so that you never, ever eat that berry again. Unfortunately, your brain applies this stringent memory-saving aptitude for all things negative, not just what you eat, as a way to avoid anything that could possibly, maybe, just perhaps impair your ability to continue on living.
- The foregoing hints at another negative evolutionary imperative of the brain: to be an egotistical maniac! A normal human brain relentlessly filters all incoming perception – what is sees, hears, touches, and otherwise senses, including how it learns about the world – through a “so…what does it mean for me?” filter. If this rings true to you, know you are very much not alone. Your brain attempts to, again, protect you with this impulse because you won’t be caught unaware by that new tangentially-related competitor or those new city office space ordinances if you immediately consider their implications on yourself.
- While there are many more negative evolutionary imperatives of the brain, I will conclude with one that feels so pervasive in the entrepreneurship community that it feels abnormal to not let it run: social comparison. Long ago, if we were kicked out of the tribe, left naked and alone on the tundra, well… we would not survive. Keeping your social standing – assessing how you measure up, using how you don’t measure up as a punishing motivational tool, relentlessly focusing on comparisons to others rather than internal goals all served us well long ago when we needed to maintain a socially advantageous place in society. Quite literally, we could not afford to be at the bottom of the heap.
For entrepreneurs without mindfulness skill, much time is spent letting these automatic programs run. This means misery, unfortunately, because the brain will bend reality to fit the agenda of “staying alive” via these programs. Instead, if an entrepreneur can see the opportunity cost of ruminating about a negative event (that cannot be changed), of dwelling on a negative memory (that cannot be relived), of nit-picking one’s actions relative to some unachievable ideal (that is just an illusion), then motivation for mindfulness increases.
Consider all the time saved by recognizing when your brain is running a negative, automatic program that no longer serves a reasonable purpose in your life (like the tendency toward ~drama~) – what could you do with that found time? Is not the essence of entrepreneurship crafting and conjuring for an unknown market what could be? Mindfulness offers a premium alternative. It allows you to shake off the burden of imagining all the low-probability, highly dramatic negative outcomes of your thoughts, and instead – with great bravery – face just the facts in front of you.
Up Next:
We focused on shifting away from automatic, negative thinking in this post. Next week, we’ll go deeper yet into the negative gore of the mind – but don’t worry, there’s an antidote for it and it beings with m. 🙂
Mindfulness Exercise:
- Extinguish. Reconsolidate.
- This exercise is one of many available that asks you to confront automatic, unproductive thinking. When we, with mindful attention, deliberately let automatic, negative thinking occur in our brain, we see (a) that it moves by on its own, if we let it be; (b) that avoidance of the automatic, negative thinking is not necessary (that is, you don’t have to engage in often-uncomfortable mindlessness); and (c) that your mental fortitude to cope with these uncomfortable thoughts is greater than imagined.
- Step 1: The next time you think an automatic, negative thought, apply mindfulness: articulate the thought that is happening and watch it in your brain. For example:
- Imagine you catch yourself ruminating about how your neighbor’s business took off last quarter while yours needs, shall we say, a little more nurturing, and oh, how you feel envious of your neighbor as a result. “oh, hello my ‘never as good as my competitor’ thought. I see you. How nice of you to join.“
- What does it mean to watch the thought? It means to let the thought sit in your brain, but do not argue with it, do not pile on, do not offer counterfactuals, do not egg it on, just do nothing.
- Step 2: Extinguish the thought by deliberately choosing not to act on it. Do not skulk on your neighbor’s Instagram account, trying to ascertain if she is buying followers. Do not research the value of her business, attempting to work out if her company is overvalued. Do not beat yourself up for having this envious thought for the 100th time – remember, it’s normal evolutionary processing! Again, do nothing with the automatic, negative thought of social comparison except watch it.
- The thing about brains is: they don’t like to waste energy. If you do not act on this storm of envy coursing through your mind, and instead if you just watch it with curiosity and remove and non-judgment, your brain will learn that it is not worth the energy to ring the “social comparison” bell about your neighbor.
- Step 3: When the storm of envy passes through your mind completely, two tasks remain.
- First, take a moment and be proud that you did not ignore, belittle, fix or otherwise mess with that automatic, negative thought of envy. You just let it be, just as you should, and it faded away on its own! This is a win for your own internal resources. Reflecting on success makes it more likely that you feel confident repeating the behavior in the future, too. (The habitual, negative thinking will occur again – but, over time, if you continue with these steps, the frequency and intensity will reduce.)
- Second, you can spend a few minutes reflecting on if any action is needed. Is there something in how your neighbor does business that you can learn from? Rather than wasting time on envy-driven social comparison, what nuggets of knowledge can you learn from your successful neighbor? Maybe something, maybe nothing, but take time to see if your focus on your neighbor contains some glimmer of treasure, or if it’s all just junky thought. (Honestly, most of the time it’s just junk-laden thought – and how freeing is that because you can quickly move on with your life!)
Questions?
Reach out to Professor Grace Lemmon at glemmon@depaul.edu if you have questions about this post. Or, if your company is interested in applied mindfulness training, Professor Lemmon is happy to connect with you through collaboration with DePaul University Executive Education.
This is Part 4 in the Spring Cleaning for the Entrepreneurial Mind Series by Associate Professor Grace Lemmon.
- Read Part 3: Habits of the Mind
- Read Part 2: Why should entrepreneurs be mindful?
- Read Part 1: What is mindfulness, and what is its basic practice?
Grace Lemmon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship in the Driehaus College of Business. A research expert on topics related to stress management, including burnout, engagement, work detachment and work recovery, Professor Lemmon is particularly interested in how people develop more fulfilling relationships with work through value alignment. One of her most popular course is The Mindful Leader, which explores how to apply mindfulness to be a better leader of others and oneself.