If you’ve been hanging around the 60 Second Marketer for long, you know that our primary focus is on the science of marketing and how to use it to grow your business.

Some of our more popular blog posts on that front include Does Content Marketing Work? Here’s the Answer You’ve Been Looking for and Why You Should Abandon Your Sales Funnel and Use a SalesMatrix Instead.

But every so often, I like to share tips and techniques with members of our community that go outside the walls of classic marketing strategy. As an example, a post I uploaded last week called How to Give a Speech that will Blow People’s Socks Off was shared pretty vigorously across the internet. I’m glad people found it helpful.

Today, I’d like to share a business secret weapon with you that more and more people are starting to take advantage of.

The secret is something that I’ve been using for more than 30 years and I believe it gives me about a 10% boost in productivity and focus over my peers.

10% may not sound like much, but when you do it over the course of 30 years, it results in things like being a published author, or being interviewed on CNN or being asked to speak at events, corporations and trade shows around the globe.

What follows is a set of instructions I’ve shared with dozens of friends and family members over the years.

I’m sharing it with you now because, well, if you’re a regular visitor to the 60 Second Marketer then you’re a member of the family, too.

Ready to learn how to put this powerful tool into action? Here goes.

I’m often asked by friends and family to teach them how to meditate. “You probably already meditate,” I tell them. “Jogging, praying the Rosary, silent communion with Nature – these are all basic forms of meditation that people do all the time.”

Many people are a bit suspicious of meditation, but science has proven that meditation is serious medicine. “In 20 minutes, just once or twice a day, you gain potential far-reaching effects that a single pill can’t grant you,” says Maura Paul-Labrador, Ph.D., a researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Here’s some information about meditation I’ve come across on the internet:

  • Pain Management: A 2006 study at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Iowa found that practitioners of transcendental meditation had a 40 to 50 percent drop in pain response in the thalamus and prefrontal cortex.
  • Reduction in Stress: In a recent study at the University of Calgary, cancer patients enrolled in an 8-week meditation and gentle yoga program. Six- and 12-month follow-ups showed significant decreases in stress symptoms, including drops in systolic blood pressure and heart rate.
  • Insulin and Heart Rate: In a study led by Paul-Labrador at Cedars-Sinai, researchers found that meditation could stabilize insulin levels and heart rate.
  • Cholesterol, Cirrhosis, Autoimmune Disease: Other studies have found meditation to be effective in lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol, fighting cirrhosis, and fending off the adverse effects of autoimmune disease.

All this is fine and dandy, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps the best way to describe how to meditate is to tell you about my experience several years ago.

I had just read an article in my local newspaper about adult Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. I suspected that I had suffered from ADHD all of my life and decided to consult a doctor about getting a prescription for Ritalin.

“You don’t want to go on Ritalin,” he said. “You’d be on Ritalin the rest of your life. Have you ever tried meditation?”

I had meditated on and off throughout my life, having learned Transcendental Meditation when I was a child in the 1970s. (My parents weren’t hippies but, given their open-mindedness to things like meditation, they may as well have been.) The doctor suggested that I meditate twice a day for 25 minutes at a time.

So, I took his advice and found that the effects were subtle, but profound — I almost completely stopped getting colds, my eyesight improved, my ADHD disappeared and, most importantly, I found that my stress level dropped to nearly zero.

I describe meditation to friends as the same kind of feeling I get right after a church service – I’m at peace, I have perspective, I’m stress-free and I get it.

The good news is that when I meditate, these feelings stay with me all day long. Better still, because I have this deep, inner sense of peace, those around me sense it and, I believe, interact with me in a more peaceful, calm manner.

So how does meditation work?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of medical studies on mediation and its effect on humans. I can’t go into all the findings right here, but I will tell you that one of the key states in meditation is called the Alpha state.

The Alpha state is the scientific term for what people sense when they meditate. If you were to ask most people who meditate what they feel, they might say, “A sense of connectedness to all living things” or “Deep perspective and peace” or even “A feeling of oneness with God.”

The purpose of this “How To…” guide is to help you achieve that feeling of connectedness that so many people who meditate feel. Ideally, that feeling permeates your life and influences those around you.

This all leads to the most important question, which is “How do I meditate?” As mentioned previously, the act of meditation is deceptively simple. They key is to stick with it. (I’m going to encourage you to try mediation for three weeks. If, after three weeks, you’ve decided that meditation is not your cup of tea, no problem – it may not be for you. But to get started, you should try to commit to three solid weeks of twice daily meditation.)

Here are several easy steps to get you on your way:

  1. Find a comfortable chair to sit in. (Don’t meditate lying down because you’ll fall asleep.) If you’d like to try sitting in the traditional cross-legged position on the floor, just be sure to sit on a couple of pillows while keeping your crossed legs on the floor. Putting the pillows under your bottom and keeping your legs on the floor helps straighten your back and makes sitting upright simple and easy.
  2. Sit quietly for a minute or two. Close your eyes. Take several deep breaths. Relax.
  3. Start counting your breaths. Breathe through your nose (if possible). Watch your breath go in and out. Focus your attention on the space between your eyes just above your nose. Keep watching your breath go in and out. In and out is one breath. When you reach 10 breaths, start over again at one. (It’s that simple. Really.)
  4. When your mind wanders (and it will), go back to counting your breaths again. Each time your mind wanders, start counting over again at one.
  5. Start meditating for 15 minutes twice a day. Over the course of three weeks, work your way up to 25 minutes twice a day.
  6. By the second or third week, your mind, body and soul will kick into the Alpha state. It will be subtle at first, but over time, you’ll begin to recognize it and the deep, abiding peace it brings. (Another phrase for the Alpha state, in my opinion, is silent communion with God and the Universe.)
  7. If you choose to, you can introduce affirmations and intentions into your meditation. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with meditation and have been doing it for a while, some people introduce thoughts or affirmations to their meditation.

Towards the end of my meditations, I introduce the following thoughts into my mind:

    • I am Peace
    • I am Love
    • I am Generosity
    • I am Clarity

That’s all there is to it. As mentioned, it’s really quite simple. If you can commit to three weeks, you’ll probably become familiar with the Alpha state. Once that happens, you’re off to the races.

Good luck!

About the Author: Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, a marketing optimization firm that helps businesses improve the impact of their marketing by 10% or more. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

101 Digtial E-book 2.001