Clif's towering height quickly gives way to his authentic words and genuine care for fellow humans. This first meeting centered on Clif's decision on whether to shift his career and life, yet again, and follow his heart and passion to bring mindfulness to even more people. Clif wanted to make a dent in the world by helping people live happier, healthier, and more productive lives. A heavy conversation before a big keynote. For most, it might throw them off. For Clif, it was an opportunity to personally practice mindfulness. Shortly after finishing our chat, Clif hit the stage and masterfully captured the crowd.
Despite being unknown to the audience and delivering his keynote wedged between an acclaimed Harvard professor and a New York Times bestselling author, Clif's talk was rated the highest. It is a testament to the power of his story, combined with an ability to be vulnerable and connect with an audience, that he can successfully introduce mindfulness to skeptics. We continue to work closely since that day.
Too often, mindfulness gets mistakenly characterized as a wellness concept that belongs outside the scope of a learning organization, which is otherwise focused on developing highly skilled leaders and technically competent professionals. Clif's approach of framing mindfulness as a way to impact performance, leadership, and well-being is unique, and his results are compelling.
In just a few years, Clif has reached over 60,000 people with his keynotes, workshops, and courses … with consistently exceptional feedback. The measured business and personal impact of the programs are similarly impressive, as covered later in this book.
When we evaluated moving mindfulness into our formal curriculum and developing a plan to scale it to even more people, it was a no brainer. It's been a great decision and a wonderful partnership.
Clif's impact continues to spread throughout our firm and also with clients. They have called on Clif and his team to introduce mindfulness to their leaders and people at all levels and help them establish effective mindfulness programs.
It's exciting that Clif has put his powerful story in writing and combined it with a practical, authentic, and no-nonsense guide to developing a consistent mindfulness practice.
Wishing you the same level of impact that our people at EY have received from Clif's approach to mindfulness and life.
Tal Goldhamer, Partner and Americas Chief Learning Officer,
Ernst & Young LLP
Introduction
A STAGGERED START
Most people will never become nor even try to become a US Army Chinese linguist, a CIA-trained case officer, a diplomat, or a Harvard graduate. These types of achievements, it's commonly believed, are reserved for exceptionally gifted individuals, the privileged old-monied elite, or private school–trained children of well-connected corporate or political power couples. It begs the question, then, how someone born into a poor family, living in a trailer with no college-educated family members, could ever become any one of those things, let alone all four and more? Many people think being born into a situation like that is tantamount to a life sentence of destitution and poverty. They would be wrong; there are repeatable paths from poverty to prosperity, but you only see them if you pay close attention and you only take those paths if you can get out of your own way.
I was kind of a late bloomer. You know the type: tall skinny kid in high school who lacks the kind of coordination needed to play any sport that requires complex physical activity or strength. I could, however, generally run in a straight line given enough motivation. The first time I thought about participating in sports, in a meaningful way, was when I decided to try out for the track team in 11th grade because my girlfriend was on the team. (Yay, motivation!) All I knew about track and field was what I vaguely remembered seeing on TV during the 1988 summer Olympics and, for some reason, the decathlon sticks out as my only memory as I write these words in 2020.
As you can imagine, I knew next to nothing about running track. When I finally joined the team, I was surprised that the runners' starting positions were staggered. In the starting position immediately before a race begins, the runner on the inside lane (lane 1) is at the primary starting line, and the runner in the outermost lane (lane 8) is positioned far ahead, 53.02 meters ahead to be exact.1 The runners in lanes 2 through 7 were incrementally further “ahead” of the runner in lane 1, with the runner in lane 8 being the furthest “ahead.” This baffled me (I never took geometry in high school) and upset me because the coach assigned me to lane 1 for my first training race before I understood why starting lanes were designed this way. As I approached the starting line, I complained under my breath that everyone else was starting ahead of me. Once the gun went off it was my thoughts doing the racing. I thought, over and over again, about how unfair it all was to be put at such a disadvantage and there was no way I could ever catch up to the guy in lane 8 given such a fortunate advantage. Needless to say, I bombed the race and finished dead last. This same scene played out during my first couple practices.
What you probably knew in middle school, and what I eventually figured out in 11th grade, is that the distance around the track from the staggered starting spots to the finish line are actually the same for each lane. The “disadvantage” for the runner in lane 1 and the “advantage” for the runner in lane 8 were only in my mind. They were illusions. They were a result of my misperception of reality. After a few races I began to realize the runner in lane 8 was always way out in front at the start of the race but as it began and progressed, the entire field of runners generally came to be running nearly together as they closed in on the finish line. Once I gained a more accurate perception of reality, those unhelpful thoughts began to gradually subside and I began to place higher in the races.
I had been experiencing the exact opposite of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is that fascinating wonder of the human mind wherein individuals are given fake medicine, aka “a placebo,” but nonetheless realize measurable improvements in a health condition due to their own expectation that the “medicine” is helping them. The placebo effect is so powerful that the US Food and Drug Administration uses it as a key factor in their evaluation criteria when considering a drug for approval, and doctors will even sometimes give patients a placebo instead of a drug with an active ingredient.2 That's how powerful our thoughts, beliefs, and expectations can be.
So, in just the same way but with the opposite impact, my internal thoughts, beliefs, and expectations about other runners' advantages and about my disadvantages negatively influenced my performance in each race. Furthermore, the unhelpful thoughts and the negative effects didn't immediately stop after learning about the equal distances regardless of track lane placement. There was a lingering effect despite knowing the “truth” of the matter. This had a powerful impact on the level of importance I placed on understanding what I was doing with my own mind and how it affected me. The key lessons I learned were that what you do with your mind matters, and even when you have an epiphany or insight about the “truth” of some situation or circumstance, it still takes diligent effort and a focused mind to continue to prevent yourself from falling into the same trap over and over again.
I felt like I had discovered a superpower but didn't really know how to use it. Fortunately, I had already received some initial mindfulness training to become more aware of the tendencies of the mind, but it took me a little while to begin practicing those skills in earnest and see my small investments in time and effort grow into a totally different conversation with life.
The “staggered start” analogy is really a metaphor for life in a number of ways. In this life, we tend to notice others who have it better than we do (folks with advantages) much more often than we notice people who have it worse (folks with disadvantages). We compare ourselves “up” versus comparing ourselves “down.” Therefore, many of us are in a constant state of feeling we would be just as successful as those people with the advantages if only we had the same advantages. Unfortunately, this isn't the only way our brains distort reality.
When comparing ourselves to others with many advantages—and