Episode 47 – Why Meditation Will Not Help You Make More Money 

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:25    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth of our marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses drive and grow into big ones. I’m your host Tudor. And today I would like to discuss mindfulness, especially as it relates to productivity and success in business. We have a lot of gurus nowadays, who advocate mindfulness. We see on lists of famous or important people that they all meditate. And quite frankly, I feel that meditation is really a modern fad. I don’t think that it adds the kind of value that people think it does when it comes to building your business and being successful. Certainly if you ask me, you don’t need meditation to be successful, it’s not going to help you to be more successful. Maybe it’s going to help you to be more relaxed for sure.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:20    But in terms of actually helping you become successful or stay successful, I think that it plays exactly zero role. In fact, it may actually have a negative role by affecting your drive negatively. So I’m somebody who has actually meditated in the past for long times. I’m very familiar with the religious tradition from which meditation comes from. And I think that a lot of people who are struggling with issues such as procrastination, not feeling good about their business, not being sure what they should do next in their business and not being able to handle the stresses of business. They’re not really going to be helped out by meditation. And here’s why meditation changes your state and your consciousness in the moment. So when you’re meditating and you’re sitting there in the Lotus position or a seated on the chair, or however you are meditating your consciousness shifts, and it’s true that you can actually access a state of peace and the state of relative calm just by following your breath in and out and focusing on the insights. 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:35    Even for those of you who practice with a mantra meditation, where you repeat a sound or it’s not really a sound, but rather a thought over and over again, in your mind, you can access that state of stability, let’s say and peace. That’s true. So if what you’re looking for is peace and stability, then sure. Meditation could help you. The problem is that the moment you step out, a lot of guys have asked me about meditation in terms of overcoming fear and anxiety, because they know that I’ve dealt with fear and anxiety in my past. It’s only helpful in the sense of, if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, of course, mindfulness can help ground you and bring you back. But other than that, its helpfulness is zero. If you’re afraid of cold calling and you go meditate, you’re not going to be less afraid.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:27    The next time you try to cold-call, it’s not going to do anything. Literally you are going to go meditate. Fury is going to vanish. You’re going to go and make your cold call. Furious is going to be there once again. It helps you with nothing. So that’s why in medical terms, you know, we would say that meditation has, is not a specific treatment for conditions like anxiety or for emotions and so on because it doesn’t actually provide you with a way to eliminate those things. If you’re afraid you can go meditate. And of course, while you’re meditating, you’re not going to be as afraid, but it’s not going to change your experience forever. Once you stop meditating and you get out of that state, it’s not going to linger. And I know that some people, they like to say that, okay, but meditation, you know, it actually helps because it allows you to take that same peaceful state outside of meditation in your everyday activity.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:25    I haven’t really found that to be the case. You can take that state with you until, as Mike Tyson would say, you get punched in the face and then that state is lost. I haven’t found the ability to maintain that state. And even if you were to have that ability, that’s very hard to maintain itself. And the state that you’re in during mindfulness, the promoters of mindfulness, they want us to think that we should be in that state all the time. And that somehow, if you are in that state all the time, you’re going to outperform, regardless of the activity, you’re going to outperform people who are in a different consciousness while doing that activity. I don’t think that that’s actually the case. I think that that’s taking things way too far. And the reason for that is that mindfulness is just a specific consciousness that you can access.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:15    It’s true. It exists and it’s there. And you can access that. Nondual, let’s say a form of consciousness where you’re at peace and you’re resting at peace. You can handle pain better. You can handle emotions with it. And so on, what it cannot do is it cannot change your consciousness permanently. In other words, apart from mindfulness, you need to learn a process that enables you to actively change how you represent things to yourself internally. Now, what does that mean? Whatever events occur in the external world, right? It’s not those events that hurt us. It’s how we represent them to ourselves. For example, let’s say that somebody publicly says that I’m an idiot and I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can represent this event in multiple ways to myself and the way that I represent it is going to determine the emotional impact it has on me.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:12    I could represent it as, for example, feeling humiliated and then I will feel very negatively about it. And I’ll feel very negatively about the person I could represent it as this person is just having a bad day for him. I don’t want to be like him. And then that would have a completely different emotional impact upon me. So that’s what I mean, how you represent what is actually going on around you to yourself because these things they’re not given, we leave under the false impression that there is some given external world, which is a certain way and that’s it. But that’s not actually the case. If you take, for example, a concave shape and you turn it upside down, it can suddenly become convex. So things are not necessarily one way or the other. We can control our own internal representations by looking at things and choosing on purpose, to look at things in a different way and realizing that one way of representing things isn’t better or more real or more true than the other one, because that’s the mistake.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:18    You know, some people who are really caught up in emotional issues, for example, they’re very angry with their significant other because he or she said something to them and they feel that she’s not respecting them or he’s not respecting her or whatever it is. Right. And that’s how they interpret it. And they interpret it as being a truth of existence. Like that’s the actual truth. And you can’t think of it another way, you can’t interpret it another way, right? Because that’s what’s actually out there. That’s the truth. And that’s the illusion, the naive illusion that everybody has to dispel that there is not just one way of looking at reality. And you have to choose a way of looking at reality that actually empowers you. That’s not actually limiting for you, that doesn’t actually pull you down and make it more difficult for you to live your life and to be successful.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:08    And I think this sort of management of internal representation is much more important than mindfulness. Mindfulness is just a specific state where you can let go of things that come to you easily, right? But it takes practice. It’s never going to be effortless, a Buddhist monk, for example, while meditating, he can burn himself for life, right? And be sort of ignorant of the pain. And there have been Buddhist monks who have done this historically as a sign of protest, they’ve set themselves on fire and the burned alive. And they didn’t even offer a single word of course, while actively meditating. That’s the thing. So I mean, meditation can be very powerful in that regard while you’re meditating. You’re definitely not going to be stressed. You’re not going to be all over the place. You’re going to be centered. You’re going to be connected. You’re going to be at peace, right?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:56    But the moment you step out of meditation and you can be meditation nonstop, regardless of what some gurus are telling you, the moment you step out of that, you actually have to learn how to manage your consciousness in meditation is valuable, but it’s just one tool that you have in terms of managing your consciousness. So if you think of meditation as one state of consciousness, you have a tremendous variety of other states of consciousness is that you should be able to tap into when they’re useful. Sometimes maybe you should feel angry. I’m not convinced that anger should be non-existent. There’s also some kinds of people who think that, for example, the negative emotions, such as fear, shame, grief, or whatever they should ideally for the enlightened person so-called they should be non-existent. And I disagree. I think that somebody who is fully a human being and who has achieved the maximum potential that a human being has, is somebody who can effectively utilize all possible states of consciousness, including state of anger, state of pain, state of fear and so on.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:02    I don’t think that there are actually any negative emotions. I don’t believe in that theory of emotions that we have some positive emotions and some negative emotions. I think that all emotions have a positive intent. You’re afraid because your fear is trying to send you a message to protect you from danger. There’s a tiger outside your door. It’s normal to be afraid, you know, and your fear is actually protecting you. It’s acting in your favor. So if the ideal is not that you get cut out your fear so that you can actually go outside and get eaten by the tiger, right? That’s not what you want to do. What you want to learn is how can I use this fear in such a way that it’s actually going to be productive for me? And it’s going to be helpful for me. And it’s going to help me make better decisions.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:53    What you don’t want to have of course is to be entirely controlled by your fear where your fear runs your mind. And basically once you feel fear, you’re not able to control that state of consciousness. And you just have to act as your fear tells you to, of course, if that’s your case, then fear is not going to be something good. But my overall message is that mindfulness by itself is not a specific treatment for being more productive. It’s not a specific way for treating issues, such as anxiety, procrastinations, and so on. And it’s likely going to be a waste of time. And just another way for you to procrastinate. I know of no single person who was successful because of mindfulness and literally thousands of people have been successful without mindfulness. It can be a useful state of consciousness, the state that you can access via mindfulness, especially if you’re looking for peace, then it can help you access that.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:49    But again, it’s momentary, its effects are not going to be forever. If you want long lasting effects, you need to learn how to change your internal representations. That’s what’s actually going to help you to conquer fears and conquer phobias, and be able to take action and remove procrastination from your life and get on with your work and with being productive and doing what it takes to actually build your business. And this is what you actually have to do. If you have a mountain of work in front of you and you’re picturing it to yourself, you’re representing it to yourself, this huge mountain of work that’s sitting ahead of you. There’s no doubt in my mind that you’re going to procrastinate about that because you’re just showing it to yourself as this huge thing. And if you do that, of course, it’s going to be super hard to get started because you’re like, oh my God, where is the end in sight?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:39    It’s going to be so hard for so long and it’s going to take me so long. How do I even start this? It’s no wonder in that case that you’d be procrastinating, but what you need to learn how to do is to change how you’re representing that thing. Instead of telling yourself, for example, that is this big mountain of work that you have. You can tell yourself that it’s going to be easy, that you have the ability to handle it. And for you, it’s going to be a breeze. It’s going to feel like you’re doing your most favorite activity. And you can think about the kind of state of consciousness that you have when you’re doing your favorite activity. And you can look at recreating that same state when you’re actually working. And if you can do that, then you can actually work with pleasure and you can achieve with pleasure, which actually makes you capable of achieving a lot more than when you’re coming from a place of negativity when you’re coming from a place of having to push yourself and so on.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:34    Now there’s a lot of people who like to say that willpower is limited. Willpower is limited, but willpower is affected by your belief. If you believe that something is easy, then it’s going to take you less willpower to do it. And if you believe that it’s super hard and all my God, he’s going to take so much effort, then it’s going to take a lot of willpower. So your belief, how you represent things to yourself actually has a huge impact on how you actually perceive reality and how reality actually feels like to you and how your emotions are like, so mindfulness, it’s not going to help you to develop this kind of emotional mastery. You can get rid of that procrastination maybe on the moment, but then a couple of minutes later, you’re going to get out of the mindful state and you back to procrastinating you back to what you were doing before, because that underlying belief and that underlying habitual pattern of representation, that your brain runs is going to be the seat.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:31    Who’s still going to represent the work to yourself as a mountain of work after you stopped meditating, right? So of course, you’re still going to procrastinate. It’s going to be the same thing. It’s not going to help you at all that underlying pattern. Doesn’t change by itself. You have to go in there and willfully change it. You don’t start differently to yourself. Start representing that activity differently to yourself and the foundation for all of this is understanding that there is no actual way that the situation is in real life. It’s not actually a mountain of work and you’re actually free to represent it to yourself differently. And you’re not wrong if you do it, it’s not a false food if you do it. So that’s what I wanted to share with you in this episode. And I hope that I’ve successfully dispelled some of the myths around mindfulness and they just disliked.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:26    Seeing a lot of people stuck meditating when they could actually be doing things that are more productive and actually building their businesses. There is somehow deceived that meditation is going to make it easier, but that’s not true. Meditation may give you peace, but it’s not going to put money in your pocket. That’s for sure. So, uh, that’s my message for today. So stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, remember to keep growing your business and providing massive value to the world. You are the reason why we’re all growing richer. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you.