“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes every day — unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”

-Old Zen adage

As we’ve mentioned, our teammate Pam is taking a class called Meditation and Leadership through the McDonough Business School at Georgetown University. As part of the class, she has to meditate 20 minutes per day, twice a day, every day. Her class is also encouraged to meditate in groups for moral support in building this discipline. What better application, she thought, than meditating with the Stories team? Predictably, and fortunately for her, the Stories team loved the idea. Lauryn booked a conference room. We moved a whiteboard in front of the glass door and turn the lights down. And our resident meditation student guided us about saying a mantra, over and over, and letting all other thoughts fall aside. As a culture-focused company, we’re pretty much game for any best practice we hear about. But even we’re not immune to feeling initially self-conscious: “The idea of meditating as a team felt a little weird for me at first,” admitted Scott. “But 20 minutes later, I walked away from it feeling completely refreshed and excited for the next meditation session.”

The benefits of meditation are so widely applicable that it’s practiced not only in yoga classes, but also hospitals, schools, and prisons. And in recent years, it’s gotten some press for being practiced in the workplace. We’re all proponents of taking breaks, but what if one of those breaks was a 20-minute session (with or without your team) of sitting with your eyes closed, back straight as possible and repeating a mantra to yourself, laying all other thoughts aside as best you can?

Meditators, especially leaders who meditate, would say that being is as important as the content of doing. And that we lead with who we are, not only what we know. And that leadership — and really, all teamwork and collaboration — is based on relationships and interactions. And that all of our actions should be from our center, from a clear place of values, free of anxiety. It’s easier to access these key values that guide the way we want to behave and the decisions we want to make when we’ve cleared our minds for even a few minutes, especially if we make a habit out of it. This strong inner identity means stability, and consistency is crucial in the workplace, particularly for leadership. Through meditation, people have cultivated better inner joy, serenity, clarity, vision, stillness, peace, humility, priority management, stress management, creativity, inspiration, focus, and openness, to name a few.

Some of the usual suspects (like Google and Apple) are offering meditative practice in the workplace, but who are some more surprising meditators? McKinsey, for one, espouses partner Michael Rennie’s words, “What’s good for the spirit is good for the bottom line”; and even Nike, whose business is built on action, has its employees pause in its meditation classes. It’s another support for the idea that taking care of ourselves as leaders and team members isn’t just a luxury: it should be taken as seriously as the business itself.