Meditate on Raising Your Bottom Line

Okay, so you're running your own business. You're embroiled in everything all small business owners have to think about: taxes, marketing, controlling costs, raising revenues, captial expenditures, building maintenance, employee benefits, and a host of other details, small and large. But let's not overlook one other little detail, something that can make or break your business--the performance of your employees (or, if you don't have employees, your own performance).

Are your employees satisfied? Do they feel vested in your company's success? And here's something that's critical that you might tend to think you can't affect: Are they functioning at their best? Are you, the owner, functioning at your best? Or are you feeling overwhelmed, with too much to do, and therefore not able to tend to all that really should be attended to? Is your stress level, and if you have employees, their stress level, impacting your, and their, performance?

What if you could directly improve not only the attitudes, but the performance--the creativity, alertness, focus, memory, health, even the intelligence of yourself and your employees? In a word, what if you could directly improve productivity? In today's business world, keeping an edge on the competition is no small challenge. The success of your company depends upon the motivation, creativity, and productivity of yourself and your employees.

Well, here's the good part: Performance can be improved, and you don't have to hire an expensive consultant to do it. Meditation, perhaps the oldest and most effective form of stress management, has been scientifically proven to improve creativity, intelligence, memory, alertness, and to integrate left and right brain functioning. It has been shown to improve physical, mental, and emotional health. Simply put, meditation is an invaluable tool to ensure that you and your employees are at your very best—every day.

Since the 1970's, numerous well-designed scientific studies have confirmed that meditation rapidly produces a state of rest and relaxation much deeper than the deepest rest achieved during an entire night's sleep. This profound, rejuvenating rest frees a person from stress and tension, generating well-being healing to mind, emotions, and body.

Doctors agree that a buildup of stress and tension poses one of the most substantial threats to mental, emotional, and physical health. In fact, the American Medical Association has estimated that approximately 90% of all illness is stress-related. It only stands to reason, then, that stress, tension, and fatigue not only could take a serious toll on your and your employees performance, but it probably is, because stress is something we're all subject to in our complex and fast-moving society.

Imagine if you missed a night's sleep. How productive and creative, how enthusiastic would you be at work the next day? Imagine if that went on day after day. How long do you think you could stay in business? In a sense that's what is happening to many of us. We may be sleeping fine, but medical science has shown that a night's sleep alone is not enough to alleviate the stress and fatigue of modern life. That fatigue and stress builds, causing strain in relationships and keeps us from experiencing the real joy of creative living and working.

Give yourself and your employees the gift of meditation. When you consider the cost/benefit ratio, it really can be a wise investiment. A few of the benefits you can expect:

• Greater creativity and improved productivity.
• Improved relations among coworkers.
• Improved job satisfaction of employees.
• Friendlier, less stressed work environment.
• Reduced absenteeism.
• Reduced drug and alcohol abuse.

It has been said that the human mind is the greatest natural resource we have. Shouldn't we intelligently develop that resource?