7 Lessons From the World's Best Meditation & Peak Performance Coaches
You can use today to get more done with more peace.
Hey all!
This one is coming out a day late—I spent the weekend on the road and camping.
It was great!
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Now on to today’s article…
From 2014-2019 I was part of the teams that:
Launched a first-time author to a #1 NYT bestseller
Helped two authors spark a movement and got featured in the NYT myself for it on accident.
Ran the world’s longest ongoing study on meditation and altered states.
During that time I worked with, and was personally mentored by, many of the top meditation and peak performance coaches in the world.
Usually, this involved launching their life’s work.
And taking something that was very bleeding edge, and bringing it to the mainstream.
Each project was high stakes involving a large retainer of PR companies, and other players to pull off the successful launch of something big: a book, movie, a course, or program.
Often successfully.
But that meant high pressure and high stakes.
And if I dropped the ball it affected far more than just me.
Luckily, there’s no one that a coach trains harder than their own team.
And so they hooked me up to machines and zapped my brain with lasers…
And generally held me to a very high standard of performance.
Now, I can confidently say the success of these projects came down to the selfless approach they each had.
And their methods for empowering me, and the rest of the team, to bring our A-game.
So we could get chart-topping results, and do it from a state of peaceful high performance.
These lessons have helped me every day since, and I hope they help you.
Here are 7 lessons I learned from the world's best meditation and peak performance coaches:
Lesson #1: Meditate like an engineer.
- Vishen Lakhiani, multiple NYT bestselling author, founder of Mindvalley.
Let’s start with the main man, Vishen. My boss in 2015 and 2016.
He agreed to mentor me on the condition that I agreed to fly around the world to Malaysia and live there for 2 years.
At first, this terrified me, but the more I thought about it fear became excitement and I was in.
We hit it off quickly.
And I was lucky enough to be on his writing team, where we would work closely together on critical growth projects for the company.
One of my first projects was Vishen’s membership called: Consciousness Engineering.
They changed the name later to Mindvalley Mentoring I think because CE was so heavy.
But I loved the honesty of the name.
It conveyed Vishen’s philosophy, as I understood it, perfectly: Consciousness can be engineered.
Many don’t know it, but Vishen was an engineer before he founded Mindvalley.
And when he learned the Silva Method, his gateway into meditation, he learned it and then taught it like an engineer.
Asking the question: How can I get the most benefits from meditation in the least time?
His answer then, and now, is his 6-phase meditation.
Which is now more popular than ever since the release of his most recent book. The second sequel to the one we launched together back in 2016.
Lesson #2: Just shut the door.
Steven Kotler, multiple NYT bestselling author.
Shortly after Mindvalley, I joined Steven’s team to help him and his co-author Jamie Wheal, launch their new book Stealing Fire.
Their ask?
Turn the book into a movement.
And we did just that.
The book charted at #2 on Amazon and got nominated for a Pulitzer, among other things.
It was an intense period where peak performance was redefined in a very real way in my life.
And I had two of the world’s foremost experts on it coaching me regularly.
Helping me dial it back in when the pressure got to me.
During that time, I tried just about every flow hack there is.
From radical breath olds, to strapping myself into gyroscope swings to generate the g-force to force flow states...
I learned a lot being trained by them, and it’ll probably take me a lifetime to unpack it all.
But when my life gets overly complicated I lean on what's simple.
And that’s when I remember some advice that Steven shared on our very first chat together.
“Just shut the door.”
It’s how he said he managed to write so much.
That and waking up at 4 am.
But just closing the damn door is still the best way to get into the flow.
No heavy machinery involved.
If you want to flow, start by eliminating the distractions that stop it from happening.
Lesson #3: Meditation only takes 1/72nd of your day. -
Tom Cronin, Meditation Coach, bestselling author, Zen Leadership Coach
If you meditate for 20 minutes a day, you have 72 chances to make that meditation happen each day.
Tom Cronin taught me this, one of my first-ever clients.
I helped him with one of his meditation programs a LONG time ago.
And that project ended up leading to him introducing me to someone who was a writer at Mindvalley, and the rest is history…
Tom taught me much more about meditation than this, but this tip is salient.
We often fool ourselves into thinking we don’t have the time.
But there are tangible benefits to just 20 minutes a day.
And we each have 72 chances a day to make it happen.
Lesson #4: Strengthen your belief.
Joel Brown, Master Coach, founder of Addicted2Success.com
I met Joel in his hometown in Perth, Australia and we hit it off.
We were business partners for several years, and during those years we ran many programs together.
And one thing I picked up from Joel was something he often taught from the stage, but it wasn’t how he described the lesson that stuck with me.
It was the way he embodied it. Joel would often tell us to strengthen our belief.
Saying things like,
“Imagine what you would be capable of if you believed in your dreams as strongly as you doubt them.”
But then he would.
We’d face challenges and when things got hard, he’d double down on his belief.
We all would.
Belief became the air we breathed and our obstacles didn’t stand a chance.
Lesson #5: You can’t out-give the universe.
Carl Harvey - Founder of The Big Life
Carl is my mate I met at Mindvalley, but we hung out more after the South East Asia chapters of our lives came to a close.
He is always one to help, give and be generous in just about everything.
If you’re at a cafe, or anywhere with Carl, he's bouncing around the place giving advice, abundant tips, and beaming high vibes.
He meditates sitting down, but more than most people I know, he turns his every waking moment into a type of active giving meditation.
We often meditate to feel a certain way at home, but many can’t sustain that feeling out in the world, amongst others, where it matters.
Carl always says, “You can’t out-give the universe.”
And that what you give comes back to you 100x fold.
Many people meditate to overcome their limitations.
They want peak performance to surpass them.
But going within isn’t the only path to those higher states of consciousness.
How you show up in the world also influences your state and who you are.
And you get back much more than you give.
It’s hard to come from a place of lack, or not being enough, when you’re in a giving competition with the universe itself.
Lesson #6: Make Every Day a Masterpiece.
Brian Johnson - Heroic CEO and Founder
Brian is a living philosopher and I’ve spent a lot of time working with and learning from him in the last two years helping him grow his social learning platform, Heroic.
He has a walking encyclopedic knowledge of all things personal growth, ancient wisdom, and modern science.
He’s someone who really could help anyone, from any walk of life, become the best version of themselves. And his protocol for doing it has been proven to do this.
(Which is why it’s used by the elite US armed forces and Navy SEALS members.)
One of the lessons from that protocol, and something that I learned from working with Brian and his team, who have perfected this art is to:
Make every day a masterpiece.
Instead of only carving out one small chunk of the day to meditate, or do what works for you and helps you create a good spirit...
Decorate your day with many opportunities to shift your state.
Until it looks like a masterpiece.
Lesson #7: You don’t have to meditate forever.
Dr. Jeffery Martin, bestselling author The Finders, Founder of Transformation Tech Lab and Creator of 45 Days to Awakening
Dr. Jeffery Martin This last lesson comes from someone who has been a close mentor of mine for the last 6 years now.
He’s one of the most interesting humans alive.
And whenever I talk about him, people often assume I am just making things up.
Probably because during the time we worked together, I assisted him in running and growing the longest-ongoing citizen science projects on altered states of consciousness.
Ultimately resulting in a 45-day protocol that if you follow, has a very high success rate for transitioning participants into ongoing states of heightened consciousness and fundamental well-being.
He has improved it for the last 15+ years now.
And it has recently become something that is approachable and achievable for literally everybody. You can learn more about it if you want to get into the science of it here: https://nonsymbolic.org/seekers/
Working with him I learned many of the bizarre, but useful, facts about what life actually is like in permanently altered states.
As well as how they are achievable and what is possible at the far reaches of human potential.
It’s his research that supports this final lesson:
You don’t have to meditate forever.
Many assume once you start meditating it’s a for-life kind of thing.
That’s just because they aren’t getting results with it.
The truth is, everyone has a different brain—and different methods work better for different brains.
So, if you’re using a method that’s not the right fit for you, at this time in your life, it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend meditating.
And if you take the time to find out what your options are and experiment to find the right method for you…
You can experience a permanent transition and no longer have to meditate to be happy and perform at a high level every day.
But consciousness is who we are, and not just something we have.
And ‘peak’ performance is subjective.
So, I wanted to end this long, long thread with one final tip from yours truly:
Bonus Lesson #8: Know what state you want.
Colton Swabb -
Everybody wants something.
Many want to own things, have experiences, and make contributions.
And those things are great—the stuff of life.
But if you want them to happen, think about what state of consciousness will actually support that.
Ask yourself,
"What beliefs will support me in getting what I want?"
And then install them.
Ask yourself,
"What state and quality of consciousness will help me do what I need to do to get what I want?"
Is it peacefulness? Is it assertiveness?
Identify it, and then cultivate it.
Ultimately, meditation—peak performance, it’s all about whether you can show up in the right state for the tasks at hand.
Because you don’t want to bring the version of you that’s right for the bedroom, to the boardroom.
Or vice versa.
And, in my opinion...
Your ability to shift your state on demand, and show up in the right one for what you need to do today will determine how effective and happy you are in life.
When I began this thread the list of lessons and coaches was much longer.
So for those I left out, I could make a Pt. II of this, if enough people enjoy this article.
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Thank you for this insightful article. I recently discovered MindValley and Vishen. What a joy it is to learn his method. Now I have others to investigate and am looking forward to that process as well.