Personal Power: Mindfulness Techniques for the Corporate World

By Roxana Valea

A step by step guide to staying healthy, happy and balanced at work.This book is about your power. The one you were born with, the power that is always in you waiting to be used. Blending concepts of psychology, mindfulness and practical spirituality with the author’s over twenty years of experience in the corporate world, it presents a si

• Language: English
• Publisher: RV Publications
• Release date: Mar 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780993130946

Roxana Valea

Roxana Valea was born in Romania and lived in Italy, Switzerland, England and Argentina before settling in Spain. She has a BA in journalism and an MBA degree. She spent more than twenty years in the business world as an entrepreneur, manager and management consultant working for top companies like Apple, eBay, and Sony. She is also a Reiki Master and shamanic energy medicine practitioner. As an author, Roxana writes books inspired by real events. Her memoir Through Dust and Dreams is a faithful account of a trip she took at the age of twenty-eight across Africa by car in the company of two strangers she met over the internet. Her following book, Personal Power: Mindfulness Techniques for the Corporate Word is a nonfiction book filled with personal anecdotes from her consulting years. The Polo Diaries series is inspired by her experiences as a female polo player-traveling to Argentina, falling in love, and surviving the highs and lows of this dangerous sport. Roxana lives with her husband in Mallorca, Spain, where she writes, coaches, and does energy therapies, but her first passion remains writing. www.roxanavalea.com

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PART I

Get Strong

1.

Ground: Find your roots and send them deep

We walk barefoot on a beach. We go to a park in our lunch break, take our shoes off and put our feet on the grass. We let our feet dangle in the water. We feel the sand, the grass or the water between our toes. We instantly feel relieved, as if our worries and anxieties have suddenly gone. In fact, they have. We have discharged them into the ground.

Our body carries electromagnetic energy. As with all energy fields, something happens when we plug it into the ground. We earth it. We discharge it. We let it go. And we are left feeling lighter, healthier and stronger by doing so.

For millions of years people have done this naturally, walking barefoot or simply touching the earth. In today’s corporate environments it may be weeks or months before we have the opportunity to feel the grass between our toes. So how do we connect with the earth? And, more importantly, why do we need to do it?

Presence. Where are you?

Before we talk about grounding, about connecting our energy to the earth, we first need to establish where our energy actually is. The easy answer would be that all our energy is with ourselves: it’s in our minds, in our body, in our feelings and emotions. But if this is true, why is it that some people seem stronger and more ‘together’ and others more scattered around? Why is it that we sometimes feel more confident and other times more vulnerable and easily impacted?

Why is it that sometimes we have presence and sometimes not?

The dictionary defines presence as ‘existing in a place’. The key word here is a place. We have presence because we exist in a place.

You definitely exist; otherwise you would not be reading this book. But in what place are you?

If you close your eyes and ask yourself this question, where does your focus go to immediately?

You may feel your focus is in your head. Or you may even feel that your focus points to a place outside your head, somewhere high up in the air. Does your focus go to your body when you ask this question? If so, where exactly does it point? Is it your chest, your belly, your legs? Are you outside or inside your body?

Our bio-magnetic energy extends around our body roughly the distance of our arms when stretched apart. This is our personal space. It’s part of us. We share this only with people we feel intimate with and feel invaded when others don’t respect it. This space holds our energy as well. It may be that the bulk of our focus is outside our physical body, located somewhere within our personal space. As I wrote this paragraph, I paused and asked myself this question. I immediately felt the core of my energy was somewhere outside my body to the right roughly at the same level with my throat. This is where I am right now.

It all starts with awareness. Know where your focus is, where your energy is concentrated. Notice how this changes during the day. Where you are in the office might not be the same place you are when at home. Get used to asking yourself this question day after day, hour after hour.

Where am I right now?

With no judgement, no pressure and no feeling of right or wrong, ask yourself this question and notice where you are.

I feel the sweat building on my forehead. Once I stand up, in the light of the projector, everybody will be able to see it and then everybody will know how scared I actually feel.

Stop it! I tell myself. Think about the slides, the words. Think about what you need to say. I rehearsed this presentation a thousand times, I knew well what I wanted to say. What I don’t know is how they will take it, what they will say and what they will ask me. So I’m spending my last minutes before my presentation desperately trying to guess their reaction.

We are a team of consultants giving a presentation to the board of a major organisation that has hired us for restructuring advice. Each of us presents one area: our work, our findings and our recommendations. Each of us has about ten slides to go through. I have rehearsed mine hundreds of times before.

My colleague is almost done with his part. I have not heard one word he has said. I have been practising over and over again what I am about to say when my turn comes. And I have worried again and again about how I might look and sound to them, and more importantly about one key question: will they like me? Will they think I am good enough?

I should know what I am supposed to say, I tell myself, and I know this is true. I do know what I am about to present. The content of my slides is not the issue; this is not what makes me sweat now and fills me with anxiety.

The issue is that I am not actually here.

I am not here as I wait for my turn and I am not here as I stand up, walk towards the front of the room and take my place beside the projector. I am not actually here as I press ‘enter’ to show the first of my slides, or as I take in a small breath and begin to talk in a voice that sounds, to me, filled with dread and uncertainty. One thought comes back again and again, no matter how hard I push it away: will they notice how nervous I am?

I am not here, because a part of me has left my body. It has travelled the length of the room and has gone into the heads of the people watching me. One part of me is now inside the head of each of the twenty faces watching me as I painfully struggle to explain the first slide of my presentation. I am in their heads, I am behind their eyes, I am there trying to see myself as they see me, trying to imagine what they think about me. I am not me. I am trying to be them. I am the judgements I imagine and the approvals I seek.

The next fifteen minutes go by in a blur. I read the slides, point out the facts. I say what I need to say, what I practised so many times before. I painfully go through my presentation one slide at a time. And as I reach the end of it, I think I should feel relieved: I have done it. Actually someone else has done it, not me. I was not there; I was lost in the head of all these important people, the board of directors of the organisation that hired us. Only the leftovers of me were on that stage, mechanically pressing ‘enter’ to show a new slide and talking in a low, monotonous voice.

I sit down at the end of the presentation and the feeling of dread is not gone. It is still there, sitting down with me, telling me I could have done better.

I wish someone had told me about presence in the early days of my consulting career. That someone had warned me to be aware of where I am. I would have realised that I was not in my body when giving a presentation; I would have understood what it does to me when I leave my body and scatter my energy around.

You probably know what it does to you too. You know when you have given a good presentation and when you have not. When you have made a difference in a meeting and when you have not. When you could stand your ground easily and when you have been run over. Deep within you, whether you admit it or not, you know when it felt good, powerful and easy and when it did not. You may not know why, but the feeling of ‘this went well and it was easy’ is very clearly different from the feeling of ‘I wonder what they thought about this?’

One is a feeling of power, the other is a feeling of struggle.

When you identify the feeling of struggle, ask yourself immediately: where am I? Where is my focus? And once you have found the exact place where your energy is located at that moment, it is time to go further: call your energy home.

Turn to the end of the chapter and do exercise 1.1.

Calling your energy home

Practising the awareness exercise might show you that your focus is inside your body most of the time and that you feel well and at home there. If so, that’s great, you can skip this part and go straight to growing your roots. But if you found out that you are not in your body or that your focus wanders outside, it’s time to call it home.

Call your energy home by focusing on the parts of yourself that you have identified as being outside your body. Set the intention to have them return to you. Instruct them to come back to your body. Imagine every little particle of your energy that you have given or sent away coming back home to you.

Pieces of you may be scattered everywhere. They may be with the worry you have left with someone else, the piece of you trying to see yourself through the eyes of your audience as you give a presentation, the part of you that was left quarrelling with the driver that scratched your car as you drove to work that morning. Just bring back the focus inside yourself. Feel your thoughts and your emotions coming back to you. One little shortcut to help you do this: become aware of your breathing as you hold the intention in your mind to call your energy home.

Had I have known how to do this as I stumbled through my slides in front of that board of directors, I would have realised I was not inside my body in the first place. I would have remembered to ask myself the question, where am I right now? I would have then realised a little piece of me was in the head of all those powerful executives. I would have closed my eyes briefly for just a second and said in my mind: I call all my energy home, all the pieces of myself that I have sent away, I call them back inside my own body. I would have seen them return to me in any form that I could have imagined, be it as rays of light, balls of fire or as an elastic band snapping back. I would have tried to imagine how they would feel when they came back. Warm? Cool? Fresh? I would have imagined those particles of me actually coming back to me and felt them getting inside my body. And I would have asked myself again the same question, just to double check: Where am I right now? And I would have kept on doing it as I paused to press enter for a new slide or as I took a breath before I answered a question from the audience. I would have done it again and again until the consistent response that I would have got for my question would have been I am inside my body.

Calling your energy home is done with intention. Simply say it in your mind. I am calling my energy home. From wherever I have scattered it. From the people who are listening to my speech right now, from my boss, from my group of friends, from my spouse, from my family, from my sick dog at home. I am calling my energy home. Then feel it, or visualise it coming back to you and being absorbed by your body. If it’s a piece of you it has no place in someone else’s head. If it’s a piece of you it should be with you, so that you are whole.

When you feel scattered around, just bring your attention back to yourself, to your body. Energy follows thought so it will do whatever you instruct it to do.

As you do this, know that this will by no means make you a less caring or empathetic person. You can still listen to someone and empathise with them while holding your energy inside yourself. You can still love someone and want the best for them but do so with all your energy home. You can be whole energetically and be fully opened up to nature or to playing with your child, or to connecting with people and animals. Calling your energy home does not mean cutting yourself off from everything around you and focusing obsessively on your own self. On the contrary: by having your entire energy home, you are becoming more available to authentically open up and connect to others. The only difference is that you will do so from a place of personal power.

Turn to the end of the chapter and do exercise 1.2.

Get into your body

If you’re used to scattering pieces of yourself habitually as you go through your day, you may feel overwhelmed by all this energy returning to you.

Before, you used to have a coffee and read the paper. Part of you was going away with the stories you read. Before, you may not have called them back once you finished the story. Now you do. Before, you might have left a piece of yourself hanging by the coffee machine in the office, right there where you met that colleague you wanted to impress. Now you call it home. The question is, what do you do with all these parts of yourself that are now crowding around you? They may feel uncomfortable as they come back. You may not be used to them and for a second you may even think about sending them away again. Before you are tempted to do so, just try this: send them down instead.

Grounding is the process of gathering your energy from wherever you might have left it scattered, getting it back inside your body and once there, sending it deep down towards the centre of the earth. Just like a plant, you grow your roots and send them deep into the ground.

This applies to all the parts of yourself coming home, as well as to the bulk of your energy if you are one of those who is hovering around your own head most of the time. Bring your awareness inside your body, first into your head, and then let it go down into your body. See it travel through your neck, down into your shoulders and arms, and even lower, into your chest around your heart. Find the centre of your body, the point that is three fingers down from your navel and three fingers back from the skin. This place is referred to as the Hara by the martial arts masters and it’s thought to be the centre of balance in our body. Try locating your energy there and feel the difference it makes to your self-confidence. Remember this point – it is the centre of your body power.

For a long time, many of us in the corporate world have been used to operating as talking heads only. It might feel very uncomfortable to get in touch with your body at first, to realise that the bulk of you exists from your neck down. If you have spent years outside your body, you may regard it as a stranger. But it pays to get used to it. Holding your energy inside your body rather than outside requires patience more than anything else. The old habits will try to come back for a while. When they do, just remember to check where your energy is, call it home and get it back inside your body. Then get acquainted with it, make peace with it.

When you are mostly outside your body or ungrounded, you may experience some of the following symptoms:

Dizzy, hypoglycaemic, low blood pressure

Unpunctual, chaotic, disorganised, forgetful

Hyperactive and always in a rush, or tired all the time

Lack of body awareness, clumsy, easily bruised

Getting lots of electric shocks

Not doing what you say you will

Not listening, cannot take in information, cannot concentrate

Anxiety, panic, fear or emotional numbness

Unable to relax or sit still

Insomnia

Jumping very easily when there is noise or sudden movement

Oversensitive to light

Getting frequent colds and other illnesses

Being irritable, angry and aggressive

Absorbing energy from other people and places

Finding it hard to meditate and still the mind

As you get your energy inside your body, a few things are likely to happen:

First, you will have more weight. I don’t mean you will put on weight: quite the contrary actually. Ungrounded people tend to put on weight easily, to compensate for their lack of grounding. No, what I mean is that you will have more weight in the eyes of others. Something miraculous will have happened. Others will start perceiving the energy you pushed down through your body. They will perceive your weight. The weight behind your words, your ideas, your deeds and your decisions. You will become more visible, more important. People will start thinking they should not mess with you because you have weight.

Second, you will feel more anchored, more sure about what you want, what you say and what you choose to do. It’s the difference between operating from the inside rather than the outside. Your power resides inside you. Once you start sending your energy inside your body, you start tapping into your personal power.

Third, you will find doing things becomes easier. While before you needed to deploy a lot more energy to get things done, you will find that your body easily provides that source of energy now. Why? Because by being inside your body, you automatically tap into the energy that the body generates. It was always there, only you might not have fully connected to it before. But now you have and you’ll notice the difference.

Turn to the end of the chapter and do exercise 1.3.

Grow your roots

As soon as you get inside your body, people will start to see a change in you. You might get noticed more often at work, people might remember your name, your face, a comment you made in a meeting. They might congratulate you on a presentation you’ve given. They will make themselves available to talk to you. Your presence and your magnetism will have increased simply because you are inside your body now, connected to all its power. This, in itself, is magnetic to other people.

Your voice might change too. If you consistently send your energy down inside your body when you speak to an audience or deliver your presentation, your voice will carry more weight. You will not need to struggle to gain attention. The lower in your body you visualise your voice originating from, the more weight it will have. It will be supported by all the weight of your body. Next time when you deliver a presentation, keep focusing on the soles of your feet as you speak and see what that does to your level of self-confidence and to your voice.

When you are inside your body and well connected to it, you are likely to feel safe. Protected. You may no longer dread your weekly meeting with a bullying boss. Inside your body, you are in your power base. Your energy is home. The whole of you is home. You feel good. No one is going to come for you in there.

The next step once you are inside your body is to grow your roots and anchor yourself firmly in the earth. Imagine you are a plant and grow your roots from each of the soles of your feet, as well as from the base of your spine, going into the floor. Just close your eyes and visualise them in whatever shape or colour they come to you. Allow yourself to have fun with it. This is your private movie; no one needs to know what happens in