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Welcome to Episode 117 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you that we have a four week course coming up on compassionate communication.

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It starts at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 14th, and runs for the next three Wednesdays after that; four one-hour sessions in total. The course is led by Rev. Todd Bartlett and will take you through four steps to be able to express yourself in more healthy ways, as well as to listen to the unmet needs of other people so you can respond to anxious people in healthy ways. I will be in those sessions as well, giving a family systems take because I believe that compassionate communication and family systems theory are very compatible.

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The course is free and all the sessions will be recorded so you can access it whenever it is convenient for you. You can find out more information at The Non-Anxious Leader Network. That's network.thenonanxiousleader.com. When you go there, if you're not a member, you can ask to join. It's free. Then click on the course link in the lower left hand corner. And now, without further ado, here is Episode 117 on self-regulation and mindfulness.

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I have never been big on meditation. I have tried it at various times in my life and I always ended up falling asleep. I'm not the only one. I remember once on a five hour drive to a conference, a friend and colleague had brought a CD on mindful meditation that she had gotten from the library. We had been driving about an hour and she asked if we could put it in. We started listening, and within about 10 minutes she was fast asleep.

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I waited to make certain that she was really asleep, and I turned it off because it was making me doze, as well. She woke up a little while later. In another hour or so, she asked if it was OK if we tried again. I turned the CD back on and she was asleep again in about 10 minutes.

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I share this because if you are like me and have had trouble with meditation and you don't think it is useful to you, I want to share with you what I have learned thus far about mindfulness and how it can help us with self-regulation, because self-regulation is the key.

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We just finished up a 12-week study on my book, If You Met My Family, You'd Understand. In that book study, a question came up about self-regulation. This is all great in theory, learning how to be a non-anxious presence. But in that moment when things are most anxious, how do you actually come up with a non-anxious response? How do you actually remain a non-anxious presence?

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Self-regulation is the key in those moments. As I said, I was not a fan of meditation, but one day I heard Krista Tippett on her NPR show, "On Being," mentione that she could never meditate until she started doing it during yoga. Her point was that for some people, being mindful requires movement. It's a kinesthetic thing as opposed to being still.

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You may have heard me say that I meditate while I am running. But this is less about meditation and more about having time to think without interruption. So I wouldn't say that I am one who practices meditation, especially mindfulness meditation. However, this year I decided to add yoga to my morning routine.

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Now I want to take a little side trip here on habit formation since I wrote a book on one. One thing about having a routine is that because it is a series of habits, it's very easy to build on it through insertion or substitution. In my case, running has been my keystone habit for over a decade. Since the beginning of the year I have either inserted yoga after my run or substituted it for my run during days when I would normally rest.

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What's important about this idea is that habits are automatic. Some habits, like a productive routine, are good. Other habits like eating chips while watching Netflix might not be so good.

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The challenge in self-regulation is that we are often trying to undo old habits of reactivity. As I go through in episodes 49 and 50 on hot and cold emotional states, one of the biggest challenges is the amygdala hijack. The primitive part of our brain is trained to respond quickly to any perceived threat. In those cases, our automatic response will be either fight, flight or freeze. This depends on what we have found to have worked in the past.

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This is a survival mechanism because early human beings had to be able to react quickly to avoid being killed. The problem is that this same fight, flight or freeze response also happens with emotional situations. When we perceive an emotional threat, there are habits ingrained in the primitive part of our brain to respond before the executive part of our brain has a chance to do anything about it. This is the amygdala hijack. Our primitive brain triggers an automatic response before our neocortex has a chance to self-regulate.

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If we want to avoid anxious responses, if we want to avoid reactivity or adaptivity, we have to train our brain to respond differently to what we perceive as emotional threats. Doing family of origin work helps to retrain our brain to respond differently. That's where therapy, coaching or being in a group of people who are doing their own family systems work can be very helpful. You can think about anxious situations when you are in a non-anxious state and then prepare yourself by practicing healthy responses, practicing non-anxious emotional stands. Practicing your best non-anxious presence can be very helpful, and retraining your brain so that the automatic response that is in the primitive part will be a healthy one and not an anxious one.

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However, in the early stages of this practice of retraining your brain self-regulation is essential because if you aren't able to self regulate and create a pause, your amygdala will trigger an anxious response. Being able to pause long enough to allow your neocortex to catch up with your amygdala will enable you to keep it in check. This is the essence of self regulation. It is creating a pause, a gap between stimulus and response, and this is where mindfulness can help.

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I have been doing my yoga practice using YouTube videos from Sara Beth Yoga. Recently, she said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said the practice of yoga keeps you focused on the mat. And when you do that, this enables you to create space between stimulus and response when you are off the mat. I realized at that moment that she was talking about mindfulness. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that yoga is a mindfulness practice.

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I started doing yoga mainly because I wanted to increase my flexibility. But what I'm finding is that it is helping with the ability to self-regulate the ability to create space between stimulus and response. A very intentional part of yoga is to stay focused on your movement and your breathing, to stay on the mat in the present. And that is very much a form of mindfulness.

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If you were to Google mindfulness, you would very likely run across a quote from Viktor Frankl, the psychotherapist who wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning, which I actually quote in my family systems book.

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The quote that you will find most often in mindfulness blogs is this:

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"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

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Frankl is pointing to the difference between an automatic response, which comes from the primitive part of our brain and a thoughtful response, a non-anxious response which can come from the neocortex, the executive part of our brain. If we are able to self-regulate, if we are able to do that, then in that space is, as he says, is our power to choose. And in that lies our growth and our freedom.

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I look at this is this is self-differentiation at its core. Stephen Covey uses the term "integrity in the moment of choice." In that moment is the choice between stimulus and response. If we are able to think it through, if we're able to practice in advance, if we are able to be a non-anxious presence, then we're able to have integrity. That means that our actions and words actually match what our beliefs and values are.

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That is self-differentiation. I'm not going to be able to tell you how to practice mindfulness. I could tell you how to practice yoga, but you could also figure that out yourself. And I've only been doing it for three months. But I can tell you what mindfulness can do and how it can help you to better self-regulate.

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The essence of mindfulness is to stay focused on the present without judgment. There are two things about this idea that I think are helpful for self-regulation.

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The first is staying in the present. Even if we are able to pause and self-regulate our automatic responses, if we are not in the present, if we were either dwelling on the past or focusing on the future, we are more likely to respond in an anxious way.

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For example, let's say you are able to pause and stop the amygdala hijack, but if you are drawing on past resentments, regrets, painful moments, it only makes it harder to self-differentiate in an anxious moment. Likewise, when we start to worry about the consequences of what we might say or how somebody will respond to what we say when we self-differentiate, we can experience failure in advance. That is, we are so worried about the outcome of what we do in that moment that we get anxious and revert to old patterns of reactivity or adaptivity.

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By staying focused on the present, we're able to think about what a healthy response looks like and how we can actually follow through with it regardless of the consequences.

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The second part of the essence of mindfulness is just as important. Staying focused on the present without judgment means that we are not judgmental. We do not judge others, and we do not judge ourselves. Having self-compassion, not judging ourselves too harshly, means that we are able to give ourselves the opportunity to respond in a healthy way. We let go of the old stories that we tell ourselves, the scripts that have been ingrained in our minds and stay focused on the present without judgment.

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When we do this, we are much better able to take whatever is going on without taking it personally. Often when people are blaming or criticizing, there is something going on inside of them that will only be made worse if we react or adapt. Receiving somebody else's words and actions without judgment, either judgment of others or judgment of ourselves, will enable us to better see the pain that might be going on in the other person. When we are able to see that pain, it helps us to understand that oftentimes this is not about us, this is about them. And what we need to do is self-differentiate in a way that expresses who we are without taking responsibility for their pain.

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One practical way that we can make the most of the space between stimulus and response is to ask the question, "What is going on inside of me? What am I feeling right now?" And being able to name that feeling, being able to identify, "I'm feeling angry. I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling blamed. I'm feeling criticized," helps us to understand what's going on without judgment.

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This is not about who is right and who is wrong in the situation. This is about being able to name the feelings that are going on inside of us so that they don't have the power to actually cause us to say things we don't want to say. I find it helpful to think about this idea in terms of staying in the present. "What am I feeling right now?" Not, "What old patterns have caused this feeling, not what is this going to look like tomorrow? Am I going to be embarrassed?" But, "What am I feeling right now and how am I going to deal with it? How can I respond in a way that's healthy?"

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You've probably heard me say this before, but one thing that I think we don't do is pause long enough. We think that we need to respond right away in these heated situations. But it is OK to be thoughtful. It is OK to pause and not respond right away.

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You can even be prepared to say something like, "I need a minute to think about this" or "Let me take a moment to process this," then take that time to stay focused on the present without judgment.

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One final thing that might be helpful is to close your eyes. Now, in some situations, this may not be possible. It might be too weird for whatever situation you are in. But I actually learned this in my yoga practice where the yoga instructor said, when you close your eyes, when you take away one of your senses, it makes it easier to stay focused in the present.

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So in certain situations, I think you might be able to do this. You might be able to close your eyes, take a moment to think about what's going on, stay focused on the present without judgment, and then formulate your non-anxious response.

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As I've said before, it is helpful to practice your non-anxious responses in advance. While some situations may surprise you, many of your most anxious moments are going to be situations where you can anticipate what is going to happen.

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This is especially true in your family of origin, in work systems where you've worked with people for a while, and in congregational systems where you know the players and you know what is likely to happen. In those cases, if you have spent time practicing being a non-anxious presence in non-anxious moments, you are better prepared in that anxious moment. You can pause, self-regulate, stay focused in the present without judgment and then respond.

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Finally, one way you can get better at being mindful in conversations is to practice being focused on the present without judgment in everyday conversations. The large majority of our conversations do not include anxious moments and anxious people. If you are able to practice being mindful in conversations that don't have these components, you will be better able to do it when you are in situations that are anxious.

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As I mentioned, I am not able to actually help you with mindfulness practice in general, but I know there are apps that can do that. I'm sure you can Google it. I'm sure you can find things on YouTube. If you are able to develop that practice of mindfulness, it will not only help you to self-differentiate, it will help you to better manage stress.

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Non-anxious leaders are willing to learn and grow in this way because they know it will make them better leaders, better persons, and it will help those that they lead.