For the past four years I have had the the good fortune to create and operate an online business where I promote an eight week mindfulness approach anger management program. It’s been a wonderful new phase of my life, and I feel fortunate that I am being creative with my work and helping people at the same time. Also, not that I needed another reason to practice mindfulness, but because I promote a mindfulness product as part of my business, it has forced me to walk the talk, and to further integrate mindfulness into my life and my work.

Being an entrepreneur is an exciting and fulfilling way to spend one’s working hours, and yet it has its challenges. For example one place where I struggle is in having too much freedom. It’s fair to say that most people would love to have the freedom to create their own work environment and schedule. However, when when you have this freedom, while it is an amazing blessing, it can also be a curse. For myself I sometimes struggle to create a strong container for for my work, I easily get distracted and pulled in a variety of directions. When this happens I lose my focus and it is difficult to stay on course and achieve my goals. This is one place where the practice of mindfulness meditation has been of great help.

Mindfulness is a quintessential technique for developing one’s discipline. Because it is so simple, there’s little room to escape and squirm, so you have the rare opportunity to face your discipline issues face to face. When you are sitting there and all you want to do is jump up and run out for an espresso, it is difficult to avoid yourself any longer. There is just you and your mind, so you to see your patterns of avoiding and resisting vividly clear, and at the same time you have the opportunity to change that tendency, on the spot.

In this way mindfulness gives you a simple method you can use to strengthen your discipline. You commit to sitting for say, ten minutes, and when the urge to quit arises you are less likely to split the scene, because it’s a little strange to try and justify, “Oh, I really need break now, a cappuccino will make my meditation practice go so much better.” So you are kind of stuck there on your meditation cushion and you have to finally deal with your own state of mind. This is a rare opportunity, and if you work at it over time it increases your discipline both on and off the meditation cushion. This in turn helps you develop the strength of mind to stay with your work and achieve your goals.

I practice mindfulness almost every day, I rarely have a week where I don’t meditate at least five days. I find this to be tremendously helpful in keeping me focused on my work. I’ve been practicing for years, and the steady discipline of mindfulness has helped me develop some stability in an otherwise distraction prone mind. Because of this I am able to stay more focused and accomplish the goals I’ve set out for myself.

Another challenge I often face as an entrepreneur is in deciding on any given day where to place my focus in my work. I am involved in a creative process and there are endless possibilities and directions I can choose to pursue. This used to be quite difficult because I would struggle with my decisions. I would have a hard time deciding because all the options seemed like good ones, and it was hard to choose just one. I would end up spending too much time on my decision making struggles and lose time I could have been using productively had I chosen one thing to work on.

I think this is not a unique problem for people doing creative work. Often we are moving so fast and we are juggling so many balls that there it’s not easy for our mind to calm down so we can find any perspective. In this case it’s no wonder that we struggle with our decisions. A wonderful benefit of mindfulness practice is that it creates the time and space to allow the muddy waters of our mind to calm and clarify. When this happens our decisions automatically become easier and more accurate to the situation at hand, simply because our looking glass is more clear.

For myself, staying focused with my efforts has been one my own main challenges in being an entrepreneur. I find that ideas and possibilities are abundant and coming up all the time, so I have to be vigilant to keep myself on track. I practice mindfulness pretty much every day and this gives me a lot of stability and discipline, it protects me from building up ‘ clutter mind’, and helps me stay on track with the tasks I have chosen to focus on. This gives me some degree of peace in my mind, and makes my creative work more joyous and fulfilling.