How Slowing Down Can Help You Go Faster

In this week's show, I explore how slowing down can help you get more productive and creative. It's counterintuitive, I know. We tend to think that to achieve more, we have to do more. But oh my stars, that isn't always true.

Do you have to do something? Sure. Do you have to do everything? Nope.

Here's how you can get more attention so you can give more attention.

First, try the one-minute breathwork assessment. Try it for a week. Note how you feel before you do this 53-second exercise and then note how you feel afterward.

You can find the video on the Back To Basics Meditation page. You'll also find a link to an easy little assessment you can do for yourself. You'll see the proof with your own eyes.

It's super easy.

1. Click the link to the document.
2. Make a copy of it for your own use (Go to File and select Make a Copy)
3. Enter how you feel (the date and time will appear automatically right next to your feeling).
4. Do the super short activity video.
5. Enter how you feel (the date and time you do it will appear again)
6. After a week or two, evaluate the difference. I'm betting you'll see one.

Here's what the document looks like.

Get in touch and let me know what differences you notice in how you feel before and after. I'd love to hear from you.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] That's one of the best reasons to slow down. You begin to notice things again, instead of letting them streak by you. You actually have enough attention to pay attention.

[00:00:16] Hello, and welcome to the innovative mindset podcast. Izolda Trakhtenberg on the show. I interview peak performing innovators in the creative social impact and earth conservation spaces or working to change the world. This episode is brought to you by brain FM, brain FM combines the best of music and neuroscience to help you relax, focus, meditate, and even sleep.

[00:00:36] I love it and have been using it to write, create and do. Deepest work because you're a listener of the show. You can get a free trial head over to brain.fm/innovative mindset. To check it out. If you decide to subscribe, you can get 20% off with the coupon code, innovative mindset, all one word. And now let's get to the show.[00:01:00]

[00:01:01] Hey there and welcome to the innovative mindset podcast. My name is Izolda Trakhtenberg, I'm super thrilled that you're here and I'm excited to talk to you about this week's topic. It's about a surprising thing that you can do to increase your overall productivity, creativity, and sense of wellbeing. And here's the surprising thing it's slowing down.

[00:01:25] I believe that we're so busy with what we should be doing, that we don't really think about what we want to be doing. And I'm recording this episode the day after the big Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram crash, or whatever it is that happened. And it was amazing to me how often mindlessly, I was going to Facebook and to Instagram to check in, even though I knew.

[00:01:50] But there was nothing going on there that there was nobody that the sites were down, but it didn't seem to matter. There was a mindless sort of, oh, let me see what's going on. [00:02:00] And so when I slowed down a little bit and started thinking about it, it changed a lot. For me, it changed how I was looking at.

[00:02:10] Downtime, slowing down time. And, and the question to ask is what if you took that time, how would it be? What might you do if you were slowing down? Would it be okay? Does it work. Are you feeling pressured and pushed into directions? You don't want to go and therefore don't really take the time. Right. So, so let me ask you, what did you do with the time that you couldn't be on those platforms yesterday?

[00:02:38] I mean, I spent more time on Twitter, but I also spent more time looking at the cool art on the walls of the study room at the New York public library, which is where I spent the day where. And I see, I find a need, a change of venue to create as well as my trusted brain FM app. I have to admit that, but yeah, I take the time to [00:03:00] go take the subway and go to the library and I go outside of my home.

[00:03:06] So I use the subway ride to chill out and I used to try to listen to podcasts or send emails or read emails, but I've stopped doing that because I can't hear much because of how loud it is. And it's hard to write. So nowadays, when I ride on the subway, I daydream, I imagine I come up with new ideas or even.

[00:03:24] I meditate. And how hilarious is it to spend 20 minutes in deep meditation and forget where you are to open your eyes and see a guy speaking with deep love to his cup of coffee, surrounded by people in various stages of napping or yapping, but it lets me be here now. And that's a cool place to be. The other day, I noticed the core graffiti, some enterprising artist has painted in the dark tunnels in the space between stops.

[00:03:49] There are miles of darkness and there are sometimes small lights that punctuate the darkness to sort of illuminate the space maybe for workers or something like that. And someone or [00:04:00] a number of someone's painted cool art right below the lights on one of the lines. You see a sort of movie unfold as you look at the lid spots.

[00:04:07] Two people meet, try to be romantic decide they can't be, and instead become friends. And I'm not sure if it's there still, because since periodically someone from the subway comes along and paints over the art to base it black, but it's super cool when you notice it. And if I didn't take the time to slow down, I would have never noticed it.

[00:04:26] And that's one of the best reasons to slow down. You begin to notice things again, instead of letting them streak by you, you actually have enough attention to pay attention. And I wouldn't see any of that if I didn't slow down and I love art where you find it, right, art, illuminates life for us, it highlights the bizarre, the fun, the tragic, the on inspiring the human condition.

[00:04:52] And so when you take the time to slow down even a little bit, you get to take in. All of this other amazing and cool [00:05:00] stuff. And it also gives you time to imagine, to get new ideas, new thoughts, new insights. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about different ways to slow down. My favorite of course is meditation, but you don't have to do that unless you want to.

[00:05:15] And I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about that in a sec. You can doodle, you can daydream, you can take time off social, right. And taking time off social does something very interesting. It helps you stop consuming content. So your brain is more free to create it. And I don't mean create content for necessarily posting on social media or whatever, but creating new ideas, new creative ways of doing something.

[00:05:41] Thinking about something of what you're going to cook for dinner. It doesn't matter what, what the creation is. It lets you be creative. Instead of watching other people be creative or listening to other people be creative. And it also helps you stop the comparison game, right? It gives your eyes and your ears arrest.

[00:05:57] It helps you stop comparing your life to. [00:06:00] Because you're the only person living your life. You're the only person telling your story. So giving yourself permission to do that is an incredible thing. And one of the ways to do that is to take a little time to slow down and not consume content as much as so many of us do myself included.

[00:06:16] Right. It also resets your mind, right? So going for a slow walk, it gives you time to sort of breathe and be and chill out and you can also do. One minute slow down to breathe, right? It's a way of filling the, well, it gives you the opportunity to do that. Very thing to just sort of go, okay, that's it.

[00:06:36] I'm going to slow down and. I'm going to give you a mission, right? If you meditate, keep doing that. If you don't consider starting, and I'm going to talk to you about that right now. So how do you start? If you, if you don't meditate, how do you start doing it? How do you get into that space? Well, I've created a start where you are a meditation and that's great.

[00:06:58] If you're already set, if you [00:07:00] already know where you are, that's terrific. But if you don't, if you're a little bit lost, then it becomes tougher to figure out exactly what to do and how to do it. And this is where I come in. So meditation, why, why do people meditate? We've sort of talked a little bit just about that earlier.

[00:07:17] Right? Slowing down is beautiful, but it also, there are lots of reasons, right? If you're a monkey, you might do it because it's a way of getting closer to God or closer to whatever you hold sacred. If you're a lay person, you might want to do it because you want a greater sense of peace in your life. A greater sense of patience, a little bit more stability, that kind of thing.

[00:07:33] And that's the whole point, since we're talking about how you can be more productive and creative. Yeah. Slow down. Meditation helps with that because it gives you space in your mind and your body and your heart and your soul to have that well, be filled with something that's positive and creative and maybe even productive, but at the very least positive and creative.

[00:07:54] So there are lots of different reasons. There are people, like I said, who use meditation for [00:08:00] opening up their creative channels. Some people use it for developing better relationships, you know, with yourself as well as with other people in your life. For me, meditation has been about being creative without meditation.

[00:08:11] I wouldn't have read it written seven books, but it's also about learning about yourself, you know? What the lessons are that you need to learn to know yourself better and to also be connected to something greater than yourself. If you, if you take that time, in my case, if you knowing myself better, that's about the earth and all the critters on the earth.

[00:08:33] Right. But it could be whatever it is that makes you feel like you're connected. It's also way first and foremost, for me to get back into myself, finding that space within me, that helps me reset. And especially if I'm. I use a lot of breathing techniques to help with that, to help with being stressed, to help with releasing some of that Trent stress or anxiety.

[00:08:56] I feel with my history, I have a lot of reasons [00:09:00] to be anxious. And I work through that often because as a, as a survivor of child abuse, as an immigrant, as someone who lived in a war zone, as someone who overcame a huge public speaking phobia, there are lots of reasons for me to be. And sometimes that anxiety rears its ugly head.

[00:09:19] And I need to have tools in my toolbox to figure out how to deal with it and how to release the anxiety and as much as possible, the stress, right? That's the whole point of that. But again, it depends on who you are and what you want out of it, but a lot of it is going to end up, use it for what works for you.

[00:09:39] If meditation is something that works for you, it's going to work for you. If it doesn't. Then my suggestion is. Keep trying until it does, but you're going to have to make your own way. Whatever meditation means to be. There are some tried and true techniques that work, there are some tried and true techniques that you start with.

[00:09:55] And in the show notes, I'll, I'll give you a link to a meditation. That's [00:10:00] all about. The really simple breathing exercise and your mission to begin a very easy practice. It does not have to be a huge, I'm going to sit for half an hour, a day kind of thing. It just doesn't to begin with. You can do something very simple and very easy, and there are lots of different ways to meditate.

[00:10:20] And we're going to talk about that in the weeks to come, but at its root, most of the time meditation is going to have some sort of breath work. When we do that, right? It's going to be with just simple breath work and, and meditation exercise. And as you develop your practice, you're going to have to see what works for you, because what I'm doing might not work.

[00:10:44] There are apps you can use. There's calm and Headspace and balance. And my current favorite brain FM, there's listening to music. Vegging out as long as you've edge out without falling asleep, that's kind of meditative. And in fact, I dare say that there are gurus out there, [00:11:00] meditation teachers out there who would say that if you do anything mindfully that washing dishes can become a meditation, Allah tech, not Hahn, certainly something like Tai Chi is a moving meditation.

[00:11:10] Things like that. There are lots and lots of different ways to meditate and that I'm developing and I'm going to be releasing meditation packs of different sorts of meditation in the coming weeks. But for today, we're just going to do a very back to basics kind of thing. Right. We're going to just breathe and that's your mission, right?

[00:11:30] So here's, here's what I'm going to ask you to do in the show notes. There's a link to a little YouTube meditation that I developed. That's all about breathing. Very purposefully if you will, for even less than a minute. And here's the mission, the mission is that I'm going to ask you to go to the Google doc that I have.

[00:11:55] There are two things to do here. I know more than one is, can be confusing, but the reason I'm [00:12:00] doing this, because there are two different things for you to do here, right? Developing an assessment or evaluating for yourself, how you feel before you meditate and how you feel after you meditate. And since breathwork is the root of meditation, we are going to do a very simple breathing meditation that takes less than a minute, but here's the thing.

[00:12:24] If you go to the Google doc and you can see the image of what the Google doc looks like in the show notes, if you go to the Google doc, there's a little thing that says, how do I. And you're going to make a copy of that Google doc. So you can do this for yourself and you're going to write out how you feel.

[00:12:42] Do you feel stressed? Do you feel anxious? Do you feel good? Do you feel hungry? How do you feel? And then. Once you do that a little date and timestamps is going to show up. And once that date and timestamp shows up, that's the before, right. And then do the breathing exercise in that little YouTube video.

[00:12:59] So click [00:13:00] on that link and you're going to see that that actually gives you another sort of minute of that breath work that we were just talking about. And after you've done with that, go back to that Google doc and then. Type in how you feel now. So you're going to have a, before I do the breath work and after I do the breath work kind of thing happening, and the link to the YouTube video that does this little 53 seconds of meditation is right there in the Google docs.

[00:13:31] So all you need to do is go to the Google doc, go to. Got to make a copy, make a copy. Cause you can't add anything into the, into that file so that lots of people can use it, but then you'll get a way of assessing for yourself. Does it make a difference? Right. I'm very practical when it comes to this stuff.

[00:13:47] I love having the notion of does it make a difference and can I measure it? So that is what we're going to do. Right. [00:14:00] And w the way to look at meditation to begin with is that right? You, you have to give yourself permission to stop the rush every once in a while, take a minute and breathe. And so that's what this, this sort of test for yourself is going to be right.

[00:14:17] You're going to write down how you feel beforehand, and then you're going to write down how you feel afterward, just so that you can have this notion of. Breathing and meditating and see if it makes any kind of difference for you. Try it for a week and note any differences for yourself. And I'm going to bet that you can just see some and you'll notice how much even a minute of sewing down will help you feel better and think better.

[00:14:43] And if you decide that you want to go even further, then I'm going to invite you to go to yet a third thing to do. I can't believe I'm putting so many things in the show notes here. But there's a, there's a back-to-basics meditation that you can grab for yourself. And it's just just an MP3 file of me [00:15:00] talking you through this back to basics meditation.

[00:15:03] What does it take to get to very, very beginning of breath work and you can feel free to grab it. It's yours for the keeping it's right there on that page. You can just grab it. And in fact, what I think I'm going to do now that I think about it is I'm going to put the link to that Google doc and the link to that YouTube meditation right there, so that you can have all three in one place.

[00:15:26] And you'll notice that one of the things that happens when you do this before and after. Breathing assessment. You're going to notice changes in how you view everything. And once you notice those changes, you're also going to notice that you have more awareness to some of that, that stuff that let's use slow down, and some of the stuff that's going on around you, that you've been too busy and too stressed to notice.

[00:15:48] That's really cool and really beautiful. So I'm going to invite you to do that and see. What it does for your productivity, because if you approach this stuff from that place of, I feel [00:16:00] peaceful and I don't feel stressed and rushed, you won't forget things as much. You'll have an easier time completing things.

[00:16:06] You'll have an easier time of conceptualizing things, which means you're going to be able to see the whole picture, which is a beautiful thing when you're trying. Productivity to be part of your life. And you'll also see inspiration. And that's where that creativity thing, that creativity piece for me happens most when I slowed down enough to see it, to pay attention to it when it happens.

[00:16:28] So if I, if I believe, and I do that, that innovation happens when. Someone who's creative sees a problem that they can solve and comes up with this really cool creative way of doing it. That's innovation. Well, if you want to innovate, if you want to create something, no one's ever created before first, you have to have the mental and sort of heart emotional space.

[00:16:52] To be open to the inspiration, which is what a really easy, simple meditation practice will allow you to do. I hope that [00:17:00] you've enjoyed today's episode. I know that it's a lot of stuff to think about. Please head over to the back to basics meditation page it's is old, a t.com/back to basics. Made it back to basics meditation.

[00:17:12] Oops. I said the wrong URL is older t.com/back to basics meditation. There, you will be able to find a Google doc that lets you do that. Evaluation the link to the YouTube video. That is the less than a minute of breathing. That's the thing to do when you're doing the before and after, and also the back-to-basics meditation, the exact, how the heck do you start a meditation that will help you?

[00:17:38] Into that space of breath, breath, work, and breathing. I hope you've enjoyed the episode. I'd love for you to let me know what you think. If you're doing this for a week or even a few days, and you notice a difference, please let me know. Drop me a line is older@hisoldat.com. And if you're enjoying the episodes themselves, please rate and review the show, tell a friend [00:18:00] about the work that we're doing here and the cool stuff that we're exploring until next time I remind you to listen, learn, laugh, and.

[00:18:07] A whole lot.

[00:18:13] Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here. Please subscribe to the podcast if you're new and if you like what you're hearing, please review it and rate it and let other people know. And if you'd like to be a sponsor of the show, I'd love to meet you on patrion.com/innovative mindset.

[00:18:31] I also have lots of exclusive goodies to share just with the show supporters. Today's episode was produced by Izolda Trakhtenberg and his copyright 2021 as always. Please remember, this is for educational and entertainment purposes. Only past performance does not guarantee future results, although we can always hope until next time, keep living in your innovative mindset.[00:19:00]