Mastering The Mind: A Deep Dive Into Mindfulness, Presence, And Focus In Life And Work With Dr. Eric Holsapple
Tom Dardick and Dr. Eric Holsapple discuss the importance of mindfulness, presence, and focus in personal and professional life, with a particular emphasis on the detrimental effects of excessive stress and distractions. They also explore the cultural shaping of boredom, the significance of relationships, and the need for active listening and empathy in building connections. Lastly, they highlight the importance of aligning habits with personal vision, maintaining a sense of humor, and the liberating effects of self-acceptance and mindfulness practices.
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Mastering The Mind: A Deep Dive Into Mindfulness, Presence, And Focus In Life And Work With Dr. Eric Holsapple
It's my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Eric Holsapple to the show. He has a storied career, mainly in commercial real estate development professionally, but has a PhD in Economics and has been a yoga practitioner for over 30 years now. He brings that presence of mind, specifically, in Profits Through Presence his book. He brings that to the world of commerce, the world of working in teams, and the world of career management, and understanding how we get stressed and how we can perhaps limit that and become more able to form connections. He's speaking the language of what we talk about in the Eye of Power a lot. I'm very much happy to welcome Eric Holsapple to the show. Welcome, Eric. I appreciate you being on the show with me.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. We've got a couple of things that are in common. You have a PhD, I got a Bachelor's in Economics and you're also a 30-year yoga practitioner. I'm about a three-year yoga practitioner. We have a little bit of an intersection but I feel like I could probably learn from you on both those fronts.
I don't know. Probably I'm just older.
People say it sucks to get old but it's preferable to the alternative.
That’s right.
The older I get, the more I start thinking about age being a number. Systems are going to break down and yes, the mortal coil is going to and we're going to relieve ourselves of it sooner or later. We don't necessarily know when that date is. Maybe some people do, but mostly we don't. How we go along that path is there are some things we can't control and there are some things we can. We might as well focus on the things we can and not worry about the things we can't.
Sounds very smart. I agree with you.
Let's dive in. You're in Colorado right now. You said you're going to head to Maine pretty soon.
We have a summer. I'm from Maine and we have a summer place there. Hoping to spend a good chunk of time on the lake this summer.
That's on my bucket list to spend time. I love the coast of Maine. I've been to some of the lakes there. I lived in New England for many years and the coast of Maine is beautiful.
I was raised on a lake and I liked to water ski. I think I'm a lake guy but we make some trips to the coast and the seafood is amazing though. It's great. I can’t wait.
The lakes are fabulous. For many years. we did extended family. We'd get a big lake house rented, but not so much in Maine. You like skiing and fishing and lake life. It's wonderful. It’s so peaceful.
We'll have about our 45th Holsapple annual reunion. We'll have a reunion and all that stuff. It's fun.
That's fantastic. That's great. When are you going? A few weeks you're leaving, you said?
After Memorial Day, I hope to.
Profit With Presence
Enjoy it. Let's get into your area of expertise. You have a method, I assume a book, Living in the Gap?
Books, Profit with Presence. Living in the Gap is my non-profit and a leadership group that I run.
Sorry, I got that wrong.
That's all right.
Profit with Presence, if I hear that, the uninitiated, I would think being present is something that serves other people in a way that leads to win-win outcomes that lead toward profits. Am I reading that correctly?
That would be one way to describe it. I found yoga was my first entry into mindfulness. That's doing that and meditating for years on my own, but I found that in the business community, mindfulness is woo-woo. For so many people in the mindfulness community, money is dirty. I've found that neither is true. We have to be able to make money in a capitalist society.
There's nothing wrong with it, but there are ways to do it, and to have to do things with purpose and to give back and being of integrity and your word and listening to people is a great way, a great business model. It's presence or focus and to be able to focus on what we choose to focus on during the day at work and then turn that off, turn our phone off, turn our screens off, and focus on our family at night or weekends or whatever it is for an individual, but to be able to train that focus to focus on who we're with.
How We Get Out Of Presence
You would think we're all present because no matter where you go, there you are and you're doing something. What gets in the way? From what you've seen, how do people get out of their presence?
In businesses, we're experts in grabbing people's attention. All the slices of their attention. I remember my college years ago learning about subtle advertising cues. They're not subtle anymore. They're coming at you from every angle, every minute from your social media feeds to media feeds to TV to everything that is trying to grab slices of our attention. It has a real cost. Look at the stress levels that we have. We're a distracted nation. We're distracted people and I find that that's where our stress and anxiety come from so much. It’s that we're not truly present to anything. We've got all these slices of our attention at different places.
We're going to a meeting at work and people's screens are open, they're taking calls and they're texting and nothing gets done. If we can say, “Let's have a meeting, which is half the time, but let's focus on it. If you've got to go make a call, go make it but we're going to focus on this issue now.” Things happen so much faster, so much easier. When you're trying to talk to somebody and have them check their phone, you're not heard.
We're not listening to people. We're preparing to respond or being there, but to set things aside and listen is much more efficient and it makes a person feel heard and it's true communication. More gets done in less time. We can't be everywhere all at once. It was a movie of that name, I think it was everywhere all at once all the time or something. We can't be. It's not how we're designed.
More gets done in less time. We can't be everywhere all at once.
We're beings of limited perceptive power but we try. We have these illusions. People say I'm a fantastic multitasker. If you talk to somebody about doing these multiple things at the same time, they say, “I can handle this.” Most of the time, at least I've seen the studies that I've seen, they're fooling themselves because when it's studied, when things are measured, it's never superior.
Our consciousness is jumping from one thing to another. I've found you can have a broad awareness of a specific thing. You can be broadly aware of your environment and specifically focused on something, but as far as even driving, and then you get down to the radio, you catch yourself all of a sudden, I'm on the radio, I'm not on the road or my phone. We think we're in those things. Our body systems can operate a lot of things, but we're not truly focused on them. We are kidding ourselves to a certain degree. Also, I find people are so stressed.
COVID brought it and magnified it even more, but people are so stressed. I think that a lot of it is we're not deeply focused on anything. We're superficially or multifocused on so many things. Being present, living in the gap you mentioned as the nonprofit, it's a gap between thoughts is where peace, joy, and happiness reside. It's not what happens to us in the world. It's what we think about it. As you mentioned death earlier, we're all going to die. That's not a problem. It's what we think about it and how we stress about it, and things happen.
We stress about the weather. We stress about so many things we have beyond our control rather than accepting them and it causes stress. Many things. It's worthwhile looking at that and saying, “Am I accomplishing more?” My experience is you aren't. We aren't accomplishing more. That we're stressing ourselves out and we're living by society's rules. The only one that can take back your attention is you. Business's job is I try to do it is to grab people's attention. That's our job and we're good at it. The only hope is to say, “No, I'm going to get these apps off my phone. It's not going to be everything. That I'm going to limit what I'm doing in emails and I'm going to try to pay attention to what I'm doing and who I'm with.”
Stress
There's a bunch there we can dive into. One thing I was thinking about as you're speaking, Eric, is the concept of stress and its causes. I've heard people talk about stress being an attachment to the outcome. How do you look at stress? I've also heard the concept of good stress and bad stress. I'm not sure there is good stress, but some people say there is. I want to get your view of the causes and the nature of what we mean when we use the word stress.
Attaching to the outcome is not being present because I can't be attached to what's going to happen at a future event and be present at the same time. Anytime I'm in thought, I'm not present. I'm not saying there aren't times we need to be thinking and contemplating and calculating. All those things are necessary sometimes, but to know and be conscious about it and it is quite beneficial. I find that when we're in the zone, most of us have something. For me, it's snow skiing, for my wife, it's painting, for some people, it's fly fishing or woodworking, have something in which we're immersed in what we're doing.
Those are the trees, and like I take a walk in the morning, I had a beautiful walk in nature this morning, totally engulfed in it. I saw a deer and an elk, and it was a great time. I was there. Being there is not stressful, even if it's an apparent stressful situation. Like they find after accidents. Some people find that they're more present than ever, that something happened, and then boom they're there. We then start thinking about what happened or what we're supposed to be doing or those kinds of things and then stress those things.
In a business context, we have results, we need to make a profit. I look at financial statements on a monthly basis. I go through everything and then I say, “Here are the things that I need to do this month.” I look at cash on a weekly basis. Here's what the cash is. I look at strategy quarterly. In between those times, I let it go and I say, “Now I'm in action mode. I'm going to be present and carrying forward those things and I'll visit it again next week or next month or next quarter what I've said I'm going to do.” I'm not saying the results won't pop up for me like I've been in a golf game, the result pops up for me, but I got to let it go and come back to focus on the moment.
The thought comes in and I go, “Not now. I'm talking, I'm here with this person.” By letting that go, I think performance improves because I can be truly with what I'm doing versus I think profit is totally necessary for business. It's not the purpose, it's not the why of the business. I got a prepayment of service and I've got to be present with the people that I'm working with, whether it be vendors or employees or the bankers, whoever it is to be present at that time is my job at that time. It has to make a profit, but I can't be consumed by that result all the time. If I am, then I'm not running the business.
When we’re focusing on the moment, performance improves because we can truly be with what we’re doing.
Being Present
As you were speaking about the nature of presence and that idea of being attached to the outcome, even if you're present when you're fully engaged at the moment, even if that moment is perhaps dangerous or something like that, it made me think of a couple of experiences I had, Eric, where I had one, it was a motorcycle accident I had, I remember. I remember time coming to almost a complete standstill where I was able to sense a whole bunch of stuff in the space. I know from the speed and the dynamics, it had to be a second or less.
It seemed like it was a super long time as I was processing it. I had a similar thing when I was in a ski accident too. In these moments and I don't know what pushed my brain into that mode, but it seemed like those moments of clarity where you had a snap, literally a microsecond where you had to make a decision about something. It seemed like at the moment that it was easy because it seemed like that's what it was. It was the presence element of it. What do you think about those crisis moments?
It's happened so fast that you can't think. You do when you're present. There's a problem. You're acting. You're right about it. You're doing it.
Rain shuts everything else out.
That's the zone. In sporting events, that's the zone. It's a longer, it isn't, but that period of time when the inside world and the outside world melt together and you're one with it, that's when people talk about the zone, whether in a sporting event. I always say wouldn't it be great if we could have some moments like that at work? Could we bring that in so that we could get in the zone or be present while we're working? I don't think you can. We all have to do things we don't want to do. There are distractions and all that but could I have periods of time when that was evident at work?
It's a lot more fulfilling because when we're in those moments, whether it be zone or people call it flow out of Csikszentmihalyi. He's the flow guy. When we're in those moments, they're very joyful. It's a happy place to be because you're bringing your resources, you're bringing everything of yourself to that moment and it's fulfilling.
It's not as much what you're doing as the presence that you have while you're doing it. You can have that same thing doing a variety of different things once you adapt yourself to it. Something is going to be easier if you're good at them and you know how to do them exactly but it's that presence, flow, and zone more than what we're doing.
Would you say it's the routine or the familiar when we get into patterns and then maybe we go on autopilot and then we start getting out of being present? I'm trying to see what you see about the things that keep us on track and get us off track. I know you mentioned the gravitational pull of the 10 or 20 or I don’t know how many thousands of messages people are exposed to every day. There's that. There's also something about how our brains work.
It's getting to know what presence is and starting and having a practice that we realize when we're present and when we're not and to try to keep coming back to being present. For instance, a routine, let's take meditation. Everybody doesn't have to meditate but if you take that on, that's a mindfulness practice. Meditation is a routine that you're trying to do all the time. When James Clear wrote Atomic Habits, which is a brilliant book. I love in there he says, you have to get used to boredom. People who are stars that are masters at things get used to that routine but also can you be present with that?
The other thing that boredom does a lot of times is let our mind surf. Let our mind go off and somewhere else and not be there because it's a routine but can we sit in meditation as a training for that because what could be more boring than sitting there without external stimuli in a quiet place, just sitting? I did a little bit on my walk this morning, but the practice is starting to realize when you go away and then keep coming back. You go away and you keep coming back. Over a long period of time, it's not that you never go away, it's that you start noticing sooner that you've gone away and you bring yourself back again.
I've experienced that too whether it be the breathing and yoga or whenever you're trying to get to that point of calm. It seems to me like kids are easily bored like, “I'm bored, Mom. I'm bored, Dad.” It seems like boredom is perhaps natural to us and to not be bored is maybe a skill we have to learn.
Our Purposes Have Been Shaped By Culture
Actually, in our culture, it is something that is undesirable. The culture has shaped us so much. One of the things I think you have to do is start realizing how much our purposes have been shaped by culture. It's buying more and doing more. Always it's more and more. That is what our culture gives us. Not more happiness, but more things. We've been trained that boredom is not a good thing, but actually, look how much happens when you allow a kid to get bored a little bit. It's fine.
You don't have to have constant stimuli because we're training ourselves and training kids that no, keep bringing in the distractions because boredom is a bad thing. Turn on another layer. Put on the iPhone and the game and the TV and some music and talk to your friends all at once, bring it on. We're not doing anything. We're doing everything. We've been trained to say boredom is we shouldn't be bored.
We're we have all these things, but, boredom, facing it down and accepting it a little, and being with it can be very liberating. The constant simulation is not real. It takes a little bit. It's not comfortable at first. That's why so many people, I can't tell you how many I've introduced to meditation or have talked to them about it. They come and say, “No, it's made me worse. It's made my mind go crazy.” I say, “No, you were crazy all along. You just didn't notice. You hadn't focused and looked at it.” When you look at it a little bit of time, it calms down.
What most people the mistake they make is I think they try too long, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. We start people with two minutes of meditation, or there's even a one-breath meditation. Start slow. As your mind comes down a little bit, first, you're more efficient, you have more time, but also you want a little more of it. That calmness is peace, joy, and happiness. It's what happens in between thoughts, not thinking.
It's being a human being instead of a human doing. That is what they often say.
You can't be in your head thinking and present at the same time. Now you can be present to a thought, that's something, but that's not being present with you. It's hard to be present with multiple things at the same time. That doesn't mean we can't operate the radio and drive and smoke and have a drink and do all those things, but we can't be present or consciously aware of all those things at the same time. It's not humanly possible.
When you talk about the prophets through presence, is it the discipline or the habit of allowing ourselves to be and have that presence that translates into greater connection, greater creativity, greater consciousness, greater ability to act in the world because we're open, we're not shut? We're not spending our energy spinning like on the hamster wheel. When we get out of that, it leaves spaces. Help me understand that.
All of that you said, plus we've been trained by a culture that someday if I get to do all the right things. I go to the right school, I get the right job. I marry the right person. I buy the right house. I take the right vacations. Someday I get to be happy, but it's always out there. When I get to the next thing, what I've learned in my life and for a lot of successful people, we changed the goalposts. Houston, where at first it was a six-figure salary if I could get that.
If I could get married. If I could have a wife and I could have a house, then the house would be a little small. I need a bigger house. I got to have not a ski vacation, but I got to have a ski condo. Mexico, now I have to go to Hawaii. We ski or travel. First I want to travel. The bus was cumbersome, so I flew and then I could sit up front. If I could sit in first class, and if I flow private. If I could fly private, and then it's like, but these guys are going to the moon. We could go to the moon.
It's like we constantly move the goalposts, rather we flip them around. There's a guy named Shawn Achor who wrote The Happiness Advantage, a brilliant book. no, Copernicus said, they always thought the sun revolved around the earth. No. The earth revolves around the sun. Success revolves around happiness and happy people. I’m not saying you can't make money because I've been around a lot of grouchy people who make money and have money, but they're not happy.
Success revolves around happiness.
They thought money was going to make them happy.
They find that “Okay, so I need to make more money. It must be more money that I need or a trip that I haven't taken or something,” but you have to bring happiness to your location. It's not the trip that makes you happy. It's being happy, taking that on the trip. Being happy and taking that into business. Who do you want to call? Somebody that's in a good mood or somebody that's a grouch. I want to call somebody that is competent and has what I want but if you have both, that's who you're going to call.
You're going to call the person who asks you how you're doing and takes a minute and knows you're on the phone. I found I'm a real estate developer by trade, been through about five major downturns, including COVID. I found the number one factor that gets me through downturns. You know what it is? Want to guess? Relationships because transactional people don't call you back on a downturn. I'm not saying the relationship is if somebody is going to buy something from you, he’s going to say out, but they'll at least talk to you.
They'll at least tell you what's going on or give you an idea of who you might call or why it doesn't work, but for transactional people, you won't get a callback. If you have a relationship with somebody, they have a relationship, you call them, you talk to them, you care about it. You say, “I can't do it, but here's what I see in that situation.” They may take something to a committee that somebody else wouldn't, but it's a huge factor in business. There was a Forbes article recently that said it's the number one factor in long-term business success is relationships. That's probably the presence, putting the relationships ahead of the transaction. The transaction still happened, but having a relationship with somebody is important.
The Need For Connection
The thing I found over the course of working with people on trying to make changes and so forth is we don't change for intellectual reasons. We change for emotional reasons. What are those emotions? Since we're social creatures, they are about how we are connecting with other people. It seems to me that the currency is our relationships and our perception of what they are, and what they mean. When we're transactional, they're reduction.
We're saying, “I value that person because they can deliver this skill or I value this person because they will give me this when I need it.” If that's your calculus and if that's say a large percentage of your calculus, that's perhaps not as strong a tether as honestly caring about that person, wanting the best for them, and wanting to serve them in a way for their life trajectory.
Still realize I have a business to run and things have to happen, people have to show up and things have to happen. I'm a leader so I can make hard decisions, but I can make hard decisions with compassion and communication and all those things. It doesn't mean I never lay anybody off or that I buy things that I don't need. None of that. It means I care. It's called compassion. I care about it. Harvard did a 70-year-long study recently and found that I think there were 800 participants, the number one factor in long-term happiness was in long-term relationships.
They even found it reduced stress because you had someone to talk to. Relationships are huge. We're connecting creatures. We need to connect. Different people need to connect at different levels as introverts and extroverts and all those kinds of things. Humans are creatures of connection and relationships are at the core of what makes us happy, whether rich, poor, or whatever. Being rich without relationships is a lonely road.
Humans are creatures of connection, and relationships are at the core of what makes us happy. Being rich without relationships is a lonely road.
It seems also that habit of the presence or that place of presence or discipline or skill or however you want to frame the phenomenon of being present seems like that's very good for relationships because, as you pointed out earlier, you're actively listening. You're there for them at that moment and that's very healthy for relationships.
Listening is the key to relationships. That's the biggest gift you can give another human being. It is to listen to them. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them but to listen to them and get what they're saying. Think about where we'd be differently in the world today with our political discussions and discourse and disparities if we could set responding aside for a little bit and listen and say, “Half the world thinks differently than me or half Americans, what's going on with them? Can we listen to somebody without judgment?”
The problem with judgments is that stop listening. When you judge something and you label them, you automatically know all there is to know about that person. You put them in a category. We all do it, but in mindfulness, what you do is notice that you're judging and set it aside. Set that aside and still listen. Let's set that aside and it's very quick. It's efficient. Sometimes we need it. We don't have time to do everything and our judgments save us, but other times they limit us. They limit what's possible because we don't know everything about another person. We don't know all that. It doesn't mean I have to agree with them or I have to do what they say or I have to vote with them or I have to hire them or anything. It means that I listen to them and say, “I got it.”
If you look right here in the model, you can't see the words, but you're talking about a dynamic that I call the people quadrant, which is our attitude toward other people. The limiting factor there is I use the word condemnation to be a little bit more specific than judgment.
I love that.
Judgment is something like if you have values, you have to judge. I think this is better than that. There's not anything necessarily wrong with that but what you're pointing to is that the problem is condemnation where you're saying, “I don't like that and I'm dismissing, pushing away, disregarding, setting it aside that I don't have to think about it anymore.” That's the trap because now I'm shut down.
Some of that has to be because there's so much stuff out there and I got to act. I have to cut through it and do it, but recognize that. It's being aware of what you're doing. I have to make the judgment now. Today's my last day, this is what I'm doing, or if it's a quick thing. Generally, how limiting that is because we can't possibly know everything there is to know about another human being. Any more than they can know everything about me.
Not only that, the extension of that is that because of that, you have to also recognize that they know things and experience things and see things in ways that you don't. If you want to expand your view of the world and improve your model of how you navigate through life, it's very handy to have the ability to take into account what others see so that you can learn, grow, and be advantaged by the things that they learned that you didn't have to learn the hard way.
One of the reasons I've been successful in business is that I'll ask for things, but I know what people say doesn't have anything to do with me. People say yes, no, or maybe, and it has to do with their situation. I may judge, “They said no because they don't like me, or they say no because they don't know what they're talking about.” I don't know everything that's going on with another person. A world of things is going on that I don't know about. Especially as business people, we're trained to not let people know what's going on with us. We're playing poker every day. How could I possibly know? What if I'm willing to ask? I see the key to that is being willing to hear no, to listen when someone says, no, got it. Let's have lunch. Did you see, I heard you. No. People don't mind being asked if you hear no.
There's a lot of power in that because it's clarifying. The worst part is the maybe. That's like a yes and a no. Those are good. The thing in between is where most of the trouble is.
The lack of clarity around it. Sometimes it's real. That's fine. What would make the difference? What would make the difference for you if I would make a yes or no? Could you tell me that? The lack of clarity sometimes can be the most frustrating, but sometimes it's real. They don't know. That's fine.
You pointed earlier a little bit towards perhaps how you contribute to other people as it relates to this dynamic where you said you'll guide them and teach them meditation in maybe as the length of a single breath, and then that's a muscle like anything else that can be built over time. What are some of the other things that you do to contribute to somebody's ability to be present and the ability to move forward in the way we're talking?
Mindful Leadership
I have twelve pillars of mindful leadership. 1) To be present and practice mindfulness. It is a practice like anything. Nobody does anything worthwhile from art to sport to business that doesn't take some practice. It does take some practice, less than most people think, like ten minutes a day to start usually, a couple of meditations, a couple of other things. 2) Identify your purpose in life. What is it that makes you tick? Why are you here? I taught at the business school at Colorado State for twenty years and mostly seniors in real estate.
Time and time again, I was working mostly out of the university and teaching a class most of the time. I had contacts and I could help place them both in where I thought they might be good at and like, and specific places. Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want to do? Most of it was I don't know why. I'm here cause Mom and Dad said business or engineering and they'd pay for it. We're worried about our kids' survival. If they don't study the right things and get the right job, they're going to starve to death. I told them, my advice was, to spend a little time.
What happens from here is you get the job, you meet the girl or the boy, you buy the house, you get the mortgage, you have the kids, you wake up and you're 50. It's hard to get off that treadmill once you get those commitments. It might be worth a little bit of time, and Mom and Dad will be okay. You can say, thanks for getting me this far. I got the ball. This next step is mine. Take a little bit of time diving into what makes, why are you here on earth. What makes you tick? What difference do you want to make? What do you want to do? Who do you want to be?
Spending some time in that area is finding out what your purpose is. Also note, clearly distinguishing what culture's purpose is for us. Mostly it's to make things and produce things and consume things. The more the better. There's nothing wrong with any of it. I like it all, but it's not purpose. It isn't what makes me tick. I love going on trips. I love skiing. I love doing things. I like houses. I like it all, but it's not my purpose. We then set a clear vision. The first three pillars are the primary ones. Create a vision for your life that you want from that and live into it, learn to live into it through your habits and your intentions.
You are your habits, but learn what you want to be and then get rid of the habits that are taking me away from that and learn over time. It's a process. How do I hone the habits a little bit at a time to be the person that I want to be because I am my habits? That's what's happening no matter how much I want to be conscious and aware, studies are 95% of the time I'm not. I'm taking the next habitual action. I want that habitual action to be working towards the goals that I set. I want that habitual action to be something that makes me healthier and happier.
You are your habits. Learn what you want to be, and then get rid of the habits that are taking you away from that.
If it's a business goal, making me wealthier. Whatever it is, I want that rather than a sabotaging act that is, “I say I want to do this, but all my actions are this other way.” That's when I don't. It's frustrating and I don't understand why this is happening, why I constantly thwart it, or why I want to get on the honor roll, but I'm out at happy hour on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. How come I can't get on the honor roll? It's hard to study drunk.
We're incongruent in those cases. Parts of us are pulling in one direction, the other parts pulling in another, they're not going to be mutually compatible. Something has got to give.
Commitment and habits need to be aligned. If I have commitments that are out of line with my habits, it's hard for me to keep my commitments. If I can align my habits and my commitments together, I will get a chance. Then I fall off it, I get sick or I take a vacation or something, I fall off for some reason, my commitment gets me back on the horse, gets me back in my habits. Something happens, I lose my commitment for a little bit, and my habits are what's going to hold me for a period of time. If those are not in line, it's hard to be productive in the way that you want to be and as happy as you can be. If you can get clarity, commitment, vision, intentions, and habits all lined up, you can be a force. Things can happen.
I love it. That's it right there. That whole process, the whole picture there does describe our agency. It's the things we can do, and we don't waste energy or cause undue stress focusing on the things that we can't control, which is what other people do and think.
We think we know but we don't know what they're thinking.
You have no idea. You don't even know what you are, much less somebody else.
It's a process. It takes a little bit of time. The program we run is nine months and it's a start. It's a process of it's taken a long time to get to be who we are. A lot of that time, like the super time, is between 0 and 7 when we're downloading everything unconsciously from our environment. It's taken a long time to get how we are, to take some clarity around how we are, and recognize our habits, being it was sort of habits. For me when I got in, I wasn't even aware of some of the habits I had. Some of the mannerisms and different things I was doing that I didn't even know. You gain some awareness around it and you go, “Wow,” and then you get a chance. You then start saying, “I don't want to be that way.”
Habits are wonderful servants. They're wonderful servants and horrible masters.
They're who we are. We are our habits. We're habitual creatures. Start looking at those things and you can change them. It's as easy to do something good for you and that you want to do once you form the habit as it is to do the other but initially it's not. It takes some work and some commitment to get started. Once you get those habits and that's some momentum, that's where the grooves are. We're easier where the groove is. The grooves we've set. We've got to set some grooves that are as deep as the ones that we've had. With awareness, we recognize, “I fell back into an old groove. Okay, I got to get out of it.” I always say a sense of humor helps with that more than anything rather than beating myself up and judging myself like, “There I go again.”
I love that because the stakes are high. The- best we can tell, we get a single journey. It might not be the deeper truth, but that's what it looks like. We feel like the stakes are super high and when the stakes are high, then here comes the stress and worry and out goes that lightness and that humor that you pointed to, and the idea of discover, play, enjoy, and explore. No matter what our purpose is, those elements are part of it.
It's a humorous key.
It makes it a lot more fun anyway.
We’re the ones hardest on ourselves usually. We think we judge others and we do, but we do the same thing to ourselves and start noticing how we're talking to ourselves. What we're saying to ourselves and then we say, “Am I talking to my kids that way? That's what they're hearing.” They say, “Yeah.” Kids hear 5,000 noes to every 50 yeses or something. You're raised with this culture of no, don't, bad.
We're corrective and remedial rather than being encouraging and proactive.
We asked, “Why won't he take any chances? Because he's hadn't been rewarded for stepping out and doing some things.” That's where mindfulness awareness comes in. You start noticing what you're saying to yourself and others because I maintain that we normally don't. We don't pay attention. We're robots saying things and getting whatever reward system that we've had for it, but there is a better way when you start with awareness and being very intentional about your words, intentional about how you talk to yourself, training yourself how you talk to yourself and how you talk to others because you're listening too.
It seems to me like that it's fear-based. The fear of mistakes, the fear of looking bad, the fear of being rejected. That hills, that playfulness, that spirit that we were talking about judging earlier. All of that seems to be one of the major chokeholds on effectiveness and creativity and the higher levels of human organization that are based on mutual respect and trust. We erode it with all that fear of those fears that creep in because of the conditioning you're pointing to.
Do we have time for one more area?
Please.
Acceptance. Acceptance of ourselves and others. First of all, if we hire in a hiring situation and somebody gets through probation and if we think they're the best person that's on the job and whatnot that there is and they make a mistake, can we accept it? I also think, as was true for me and so many people I work with, we're so hard to accept ourselves. We're not quite right. We've got this vision of it. A lot of that comes from like that time from 0 to 7 or whatever, that we've heard so much negativity. We got it at home and then, classmates, aren't they wonderful?
Don't they say nice things to me all day long? No, I don't get all the positive reinforcements and I've brought it all on. I've heard it all. I subconsciously still have a lot of negative things. Regardless of how successful you are, you still have these things that you're wearing. They bust through that and say, “You know what? I accept you. I accept myself and I accept you.” If I'm out there working and somebody's not doing the job, then I'm not going to accept that. Generally, we're imperfect creatures. We all make mistakes. We work together to fix them.
What a liberating thing it was at work when I started accepting people as being, I knew they were the best in the field rather than chiding them by saying, “Okay. What are we going to do to fix it? How are we going to get at that?” What are we liberating that thing is people then will try. They'll stretch because they're not afraid to make a mistake. How limiting is if you're all the time worried about mistakes, it is limited how successful you can be. The same with you. You stretch yourself.
Constantly worrying about a mistake you made limits how successful you can be.
As an entrepreneur, I've learned more and made more money from failures than good markets scare me. Going on one way for him to go the other direction, but so many times, if you get that way and you look at a mistake, but where's the opportunity in it? What's next? I know there's something and this is good. He started learning that. Anybody successful will tell you how many mistakes they've made and what they've learned from it. If you start turning those into positives, then the game begins with what's possible.
Getting Started
That's fantastic stuff. I love where you're coming from, Eric. For somebody listening to us and eating up what you're saying there, wants to be more present, wants to bring this spirit and approach to their life through their business, how do you guide them? What should they do?
They can go to our website, LivingInTheGap.org. There are free resources. I've learned how to start a mindfulness practice. There's a list of introductory books. There are introductory practices there. The book, Profit with Presence is a summary of a pretty intense program that we take on over nine months. It's available on Amazon or the website, Profit with Presence: The Twelve Pillars of Mindful Leadership. The first thing I would say is to get started with something. It doesn't have to be through Living in the Gap or Profit with Presence. Get started with something that improves your awareness.
Profit with Presence: The Twelve Pillars of Mindful Leadership
If you're going to do one thing, be grateful. Practice gratitude every day. It changes your mindset. It doesn't have to be meditation, but start looking around and say, “Why was I born out of all the possible eggs that were out there? How did I get born? How did I get born in America or wherever it is that you are? How did I get this family?” Be grateful for a few things each day and possibly write them down if that works. If not, whatever works. That mindset change alone if you're going to do one thing is a great place to start.
I've heard it said that gratitude is next-door neighbors with abundance.
When you're grateful, you look for things differently. You look for things to be grateful for. If you leave the house sour every day, you're more likely to see those things because we are so much creating what we find.
It's funny as time goes on, the sciences of perception and physics and everything as they advance, we're finding more and more that those ancient truths are more and more true to see that fact that we do create our realities in a big way like that.
I've read so many of those Eastern texts is how I got started and blows you away. One reason is to look at the time that they had to think and study and contemplate about things and to be that now we can't have a minute. Can you imagine? I think I'll go stargaze this weekend. We have to have it's the movie to this, to that, to the sporting event, to this. They would sit and watch the stars and hunt and gather, or whatever. What they came up with isn't as amazing when you think about how much time they had with all the distractions. We can wedge in 10 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it is a day to be in that and create some space. I think we can find that time.
We also think of the modern, let's say the world is propelled by widespread electricity. That's a blink of an eye as it relates to human history. We think of ourselves sometimes as so advanced and knowledgeable. I heard it said recently, I've said this a few times in some interviews because it stands out so much as intelligence is knowledge about that which changes. We are getting very intelligent. We are learning a lot about things that are changeable. Wisdom is knowledge about that which doesn't change. That's the thing that you're pointing to, knowledge about the things that don't change. Maybe we need a little bit more attention and effort put into that. That might help us.
I love that. That's great.
Eric, thank you so much. I've enjoyed our conversation very much. I think you've shared a lot of wisdom with our audience. For that, I thank you so much.
You're welcome. I appreciate being on.
My pleasure.
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Thank you, Eric, for being my guest today. I loved everything you put down there. Very compatible with what we talk about in the Eye of Power community. The idea of presence, the idea of it being a practice and a discipline, the idea of being available for other people, and valuing relationships, the idea of not being connected to outcomes to not be so stressed. We're so stressed with all the things that pull us in various directions. It's an easy way to fall in.
He also stressed the power of habit. As I said while we were talking, habits are fantastic servants and tyrannical masters. The effort that we can put forward to make sure we have habits that serve us and others and we do away with the habits that no longer serve us or others is one of the better places we can put our energy and our attention. Thank you very much, Eric, for that. Thank you very much for tuning in to our discussion today.
Important Links
Dr. Eric Holsapple - LinkedIn
About Eric Holsapple
MINDFULNESS:
Eric Holsapple is a successful developer and entrepreneur who has used mindfulness to transform his life and business, and helps others do the same.
Eric has a PhD in Economics, has been a real estate CEO and developer for nearly 40 years, lectured real estate at Colorado State University for 20 years, and practiced yoga and meditation for 30 years. Holsapple has a unique perspective on how merging business and mindfulness can be a catalys in changing lives.
Eric is the founder of Living in the Gap. His popular workshops teach CEOs and professionals a different way to operate mindfully while improving the bottom line.
REAL ESTATE:
Holsapple has been in Commercial real Estate on a national basis for over 40 years and developed commercial projects with tenants such as Kroger, Walgreens, and Target and has developed hundreds of residential and mixed-use projects. Holsapple taught real estate at Colorado State University for 20 years and help found the Everitt Real Estate Center and served as Executive Director of Real Estate. Holsapple has also studied yoga and meditation for over 25 years and runs a mindful leadership nonprofit called Living in the Gap that trains professionals to make the most of thier lives and businesses and communities.