How to Make Mindfulness Relevant for Daily Life
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- How do you make mindfulness and meditation relevant to people so they actually stick with the practice? How do you encourage them to integrate it into their daily life so that they actually use it on a daily basis and not forget about it or forget you in a few days? I've been teaching mindfulness and meditation for a long time, and this issue of relevancy is critical.

I'm not a fan of cookie cutter mindfulness teachings. I'm not a fan of cookie cutter meditations. I think that the more relevant that you can make things to people in their actual day-to-day lives, the better. I've been teaching people how to teach mindfulness in therapy, counseling, coaching, yoga teaching,

all sorts of professional settings for about 10 years now in our Mindfulness Teacher Certification Program. And one of the hallmarks of our program is that we help you to

make mindfulness and meditation teachings relevant to the people you want to serve for the greatest impact, the greatest influence, even the greatest income that you can make. Because the more relevant you can make it to people, whether they're a trauma survivor, whether they're a yoga student, whether they're

An executive, whoever they are, you want to make mindfulness relevant to their emotions, their goals, their physical capacities, their mindfulness experience levels, their challenges that they're working with.

Whether they're a parent or not, the list goes on. And so we make the mindfulness trainings that you can use. And we provide you templates that you can use that you can modify to

to make things relevant and to support you in learning about how to make things relevant and how to create a bigger impact on people so that they actually use mindfulness in a day-to-day level. I'd like to share a clip with you of an interaction that I had with a new mindfulness meditation teacher in which they asked this question, how do we make mindfulness relevant to people today?

for maximum impact. So I want to share this video with you. I hope you like it, but I'd love to hear from you. Like what ways do you make mindfulness or meditation relevant to other people? Or as a practitioner, what do you relate to most from teachers who speak to you? Do they speak to you

As a man or a woman, as a parent or an executive, as someone who's going through a certain type of emotional challenge? Or do you like meditations or teachers who focus on certain kinds of goals like sleep or peak performance or chronic pain? So what resonates with you?

What's relevant to you in your life as a practitioner and how do you make things relevant to other people? And when we're making things relevant to other people, this is a form of compassion and empathy. How can we care for other people with their lived challenges and goals? So I hope that you like this video of this interaction that I had last week.

Love to hear your feedback and your thoughts. And hope you enjoy the video. First, I think it's helpful to know what outcomes do they want? What's important to them? 'Cause every business is different. Every leader is different. Every professional has different goals. So what do they want? What outcomes do they want? And what are their biggest pain points?

What are the barriers between where they are now and what they want? And so, you know, you can relate mindfulness to certain outcomes. You can also relate it to pain points. And sometimes certain people will resonate with the outcomes more. Other people may resonate with addressing pain points more.

So you can kind of sense into the art of that a little bit with each group or each person. But the overarching point here is to ask or to find out what are their goals or what are their pain points. And then you might need a couple days to figure out how mindfulness relates to

pain points or goals. In my experience in these settings with groups, I tend to talk about the benefits of sort of the five pillars of emotional intelligence. And sometimes I won't even use the word mindfulness, but I'll look at emotional intelligence. And I actually have a course

the mindfulness course at Google. I will send it to you to show how Google frames this. My website is the only place online where you can find this. So I will send a link here in the chat section. Can you see that link? The chat. Yeah, I can.

Yeah, and you can relate it, relate mindfulness to self-awareness, emotional regulation, resilience is a huge word, empathy slash compassion, and then mindful communication and how we speak and communicate with our bosses, the people who we manage, our customers, etc.,

I do this at companies that will do a 30-second practice. And then who here is experiencing immediate benefit? And the majority of our hands raise. So it's not like a belief that the outcome will come at some point. It's visceral experience right now. Like I'm actually benefiting right now. Do you feel less stress now than you did 30 seconds ago?

Obviously, the answer would be, yes, I feel less stressed now because you just connected. Yeah, it's not everybody. But like most people do, three breaths, one breath. So I think what you're saying is true. And, you know, it's not black or white. There's a lot. Sure. No, I think this program that you shared with me will really help me. Thank you, Sean. This was really helpful.

Sure. Yeah. I think just one more resource that I highly recommend is the Sharon Salzberg book, Real Happiness at Work, which outlines a lot of, well, it relates a lot of mindfulness practices to the real world, you know, work experience. And she does a great job of relating mindfulness to, you know, what it's actually like to work

in a cubicle, boardroom, office? Which practices are most conducive? Like when you can do certain practices, talk about them with others without seeming a little weird or preachy or whatever. So real happiness at work is also like a really fantastic resource for this demographic.