Rob Dube: Do Nothing

Transcript

[0:00:34] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Rob Dube, author of Do Nothing. Do you feel like you have a hundred things you need to get done today? If you’re a business leader, the answer is ‘Yes’. You have to make decisions, fix problems, manage money. But Rob has found that he’s become a much more effective leader by learning to do nothing. And his company has seen the results. Rob is the president and cofounder of image one which was ranked on the 2017 list of Forbes Small Giants, America’s best small companies. IN this episode, Rob shares what he’s learned from 12 years of practicing meditation and how those lessons have made him a better leader and a better person. Now, here is our conversation with Rob Dube.

[0:01:47] Rob Dube: Around eight years old, my parents got divorced and at that time, it wasn’t as common as it is today and it did have an effect on me as it does to with many children nowadays even as common as it is. I had a lot of isolation growing up and I also had a number of health challenges, I had severe asthma, I had eczema on my skin and I had a heart irregularity. When you couple that all together, I was a pretty anxious child and I was very active, I did not want these health issues to slow me down with sports and things of that nature, I combined this sort of isolation that I had with this activity where I would play things like Nerf hoop in my bedroom or baseball against the wall of our home and I would create these scenarios where I was winning the NBA Championship or the World Series against the wall. I had a pretty active imagination and being independent, I often times had to figure things out on my own and as I got older and I think it was around 14 years old, I moved in with my father and he was in sales, traveled a good deal so my independence was even greater, through my high school years. During that time, my best friend Joe Pearlman and I decided to start a business. We started selling these blow pop lollipops out of our locker, we would buy them for a nickel, Joel’s uncle owned a drug store, he would sell us them by the box and they cost us about five cents each when you bought them in bulk like that. We’d sell them for a quarter out of our locker and kids at our high school were literally lined up and own the hallway, picture that because this is exactly what it was to buy these blow pops. We would skip lunch, we’d go right to our lockers and be selling these things throughout our lunch period. By the end of the lunch period, we would have baggies full of quarters, we didn’t want to leave them in our locker because it seemed like it was a zillion dollars at the time, we have them in our pockets, we’d be walking around school with these baggies of quarters bulging out of our pockets.

[0:04:18] Charlie Hoehn: Were you making like 10, 20 bucks a day?

[0:04:21] Rob Dube: Probably, I would love to know the actual amount actually. It’s really funny. But I think upon reflection, an entrepreneurial bug had bit us and so we had all sorts of different businesses through high school, in college and when we graduated or around the time we were getting ready to graduate college, Joel was reading an entrepreneurial magazine and in the back of it, there was a small classified ad. That ad was for budding entrepreneurs or people that wanted to start their own business to learn how to take these toner cartridges which were new at the time and went into these new machines called laser printers, this was about 26, 27 years ago. It was a very new product and you would learn how to recycle them or remanufacture them. We thought, that could be interesting, it’s new, it seems like this you know, thing that’s growing in terms of the popularity of these printers and businesses using them. We went to Austin, Texas with a loan from each of our parents, $5,000 each and we got trained on how to remanufacture these toner cartridges. We came back and we started this business out of our basement and grew it into a small office, when our parents kicked us out and we really got going. The challenge that we had early on was first, Joel and I are not very handy, when we would remanufacture these cartridges, 50% of the time, they would not work. We would get customers, they would be excited that they were saving money and I’m sure they were equally excited that they were supporting these two young kids out of college but unfortunately, the products weren’t working. We had to learn very early on that we had to take amazing care of our customers and so right from the get go, we knew we had to provide an extraordinary experience for them and that’s just what we did. Somehow, some way, we were able to retain a good number of these customers and continue to grow the business.

[0:06:43] Charlie Hoehn: How did you provide that phenomenal customer experience?

[0:06:48] Rob Dube: Well, it had a lot to do with how we bade our customers and how we make our customers feel, we weren’t – from a service standpoint, and when you look up the word service, it’s really tactically speaking, what you’re delivering and what the customer expects. In our case, they expected a toner cartridge that worked and we weren’t providing that service very well. But we were very hospitable and that’s what we call the X in ‘extraordinary’. It’s how we made them feel. Just by our nature, it’s inherent in us. We were empathetic, we listened deeply and we urgently wanted to take care of their problem. We would do whatever it took. We used to do things like go to the large office suppliers, say like Staples and we’d buy a brand new toner cartridge and replace it with the remanufactured toner cartridge that we had sold them. That would come at a financial loss to us but it was worth it in our minds because we just wanted them to be happy. Somehow again, inherently, we knew and I wish I could say that that was a strategy, it wasn’t, it was just the way we were wired. Somehow we knew that they would stick with us if we did the right thing, they would tell other companies and those companies would do business with us and our company would grow from that. That’s what happened and as our industry evolved and as printers turned into multi-function printers and so on and so forth, we became a company that was not a remanufacturer of toner cartridges, in fact, we don’t do that anymore and we have it for a good number of years. What we do now is we actually sell service and supply printers, multi-function printers, copiers and we have contracts that usually are three to five years in length with our customers to manage all those print devices that they have at their businesses or organizations and then we also supply them with software solutions that helps them to print smarter to save them money, be more efficient. Make sure their print devices are secure and help them with their document workflow, electronically. We’ve evolved quite a bit in the 26 years that we’ve been in business.

[0:09:14] Charlie Hoehn: That’s pretty remarkable that you’ve been in the printer, and then expanded to other businesses, there were other verticals within that business for 26 years. That’s remarkable.

[0:09:28] Rob Dube: It’s been quite a journey and I got to tell you, I learn something new every single day and I really enjoy it and along the way, in 2004, we were approached by a public company, we happened to have, had won an account where the two of us were sort of duking it out and we were the ones that came away with the account and they were a bit baffled that this little company out of Detroit Michigan won the contract over them. To their credit, they contacted us to see what exactly we were doing and what we were up to. It started a dialogue and one thing led to another and we ended up selling the company to them. The reasons we did that were a few. First of all, we were very interested in growing the company, they had 500 sales people located around the country and it wasn’t hard to figure out that if those 500 sales people just did a little bit of business selling our services, our company would grow tremendously. The second reason we did it was they were going to allow us to run the company separate from theirs so that was what was called a wholly owned subsidiary and nobody in our company would lose their jobs. It was very exciting and it was a great vision. We went forward with the acquisition and at the end of 2004, we sold the company. Very shortly after, we started to realize that this was a difficult scenario. I’d like to use the term vision without execution is hallucination and I think we were all hallucinating because we were not executing on our vision. The sales people were not being trained, they weren’t being held accountable to selling our products and so that vision just wasn’t taking place and it was frustrating for us because we so badly wanted to do great things, we wanted the company to grow, we wanted to provide opportunity for our team members. We deeply wanted that company to get a return on the investment they had made in us and unfortunately, it wasn’t happening. My anxiety which had started when I was a child and stuck with me as I grew up and was running the business was at an all-time high. I had been looking for ways that I could help subside that anxiety over the years, I had been to therapy which was helpful. But my anxiety was still around and I’d read about meditation but I never tried it and I never did anything with it.

[0:12:20] Charlie Hoehn: Well, just a second Rob, before we get into the meditation, what exactly were you anxious about? You know, you had sold your company, in a way, the responsibility had spread out, diffused, I believe is, I’m trying to remember if t hat’s the right word. Other people were responsible for the success of the company. What were you afraid of?

[0:12:43] Rob Dube: I think the way I’m wired is I’m highly accountable. I had a job to do and I’m used to being successful and at what I do and I take great pride in that and it wasn’t successful and that was really the gist of it. That’s why my anxiety was so high. Just because the ownership had transferred, it didn’t change for me the fact that I wanted to do amazing things and I did – yeah, I did want the company to grow because I felt that there would be tremendous amount of opportunity for the team members and that was one of the things we shared with them when we were selling the business that this is going to be a great thing for you as well. I felt a sense of responsibility around that.

[0:13:34] Charlie Hoehn: Sure. How was your anxiety manifesting? You know, for some people, rapid heart-rate, for some people it’s panic attacks, how bad did things get?

[0:13:44] Rob Dube: I think the best way to put it is I wasn’t my true self often, I would be in another place even though I was with people like my team members, my family members, I’m married, I have kids at the time, they were younger so I could sense things. Sometimes I would be a little bit short with people and so that was another component to it. Just sometimes my mind just felt very full which made it hard for me to be my best self. I have a very busy mind by nature and so when it is on overload, I just don’t operate at my best. I felt that and that causes and manifests other things in our lives as well. I wouldn’t sleep well, my stomach would bother me, things of that nature. I could just tell things were not right and I think also, being in therapy brought that out as well.

[0:14:44] Charlie Hoehn: You tried therapy, what else did you try?

[0:14:48] Rob Dube: When I say I tried it, I’m a big believer, and that was a very helpful part of my journey. I would not discount that and I’m not suggesting you were saying that but discount that part of my journey at all. That was really all, I tried, I’ve run and I felt like that was a bit of a helpful getaway for me, again, it wasn’t really subsiding it too much but it was a helpful release of energy for me. When I had read about the meditation, it did prompt a curiosity for me, again, I didn’t do anything about it for a number of years and I happened to be on vacation, the summer of 2005 with my family and I remembered the day so well because it was a beautiful day and they were all out enjoying the day as they should have been. I was inside the home in Northern Michigan and I was working and I was dealing with some frustrating situations and I was literally on the verge of tears. I got off the phone and I just took a breath and I just was sitting there and I just remembered, “I don’t know what to do right now,” and this meditation idea sort of popped in my head and I just said to myself, “Rob, I looked over at this chair, I said Rob, go sit in that chair and just breathe in and breathe out like you read about and just do it for five minutes.” I went over to this chair and I just breathed in and I breathed out and I set a timer for five minutes and at the end of the five minutes, I actually felt better and I’m not saying the world changed because it didn’t. My problems didn’t go away, I still had the same frustrations, I just felt calmer. I thought, “Wow, okay, that’s interesting.” I got more – I’m a fact finder by nature and so I started to look more into what meditation was all about and start to understand it better, trying some different techniques, understanding the science behind it, that was important for me. Understanding that it was a secular practice in many cases, meaning, it didn’t have a religious affiliation and I started to take on a daily practice with a little bit at a time each day and sort of worked my way up and I just noticed over a period of time and it wasn’t a day and it wasn’t a week, I can’t really pinpoint the exact amount of time but I noticed that I really started to feel a bit calmer. I noticed that I wasn’t as reactionary in my life. I noticed that I had greater patience and I had a better presence and awareness with my family with my kids and then I really started to notice at my business. I felt that I was a better listener and people started to recognize it and say things to me that you know – They would say, “I really appreciate how well you were listening during that conversation,” and things of that nature started to really bring out in my own mind that this meditation is really making a difference. Again, being that fact finder, being so curious, I started to learn more about different components of meditation, I learned about silent retreats and I went on a day long silent retreat out in California just to see if I could do it. I did it with the person who led it, is a person by the name of Jack Kornfield who is pretty well known at leading retreats and his expertise in the field of meditation. I had no problem that day, in fact, I thought it was an amazing day.

[0:18:34] Charlie Hoehn: You know what’s nice is just to briefly interrupt, is I think a lot of people here have meditation retreats and they assume they’re like 10 days long. It’s good to hear that you can just go for one day, once you get comfortable with it so that’s great.

[0:18:50] Rob Dube: Yes, that’s a great point. I’m glad I started that way because I was nervous. Even just for that one day to think wow, I’m not going to talk for a whole day. But then, I felt like I could do it for a longer period of time and the next year, I signed up and went on a seven day silent retreat and I found that to be very impactful and I thought to myself, “I’m going to do this once a year,” and I did it the next year and I thought to myself, “I’m going to do this twice a year actually.” Every six months I’m going to try to get this in. I started doing that and ultimately got to know one of the teachers at the retreat that I had been attending which is in Colorado called the Shambala Mountain Center and they were leading the retreat.

[0:19:41] Charlie Hoehn: That’s in the springs, right? Colorado Springs or I forget where it is.

[0:19:46] Rob Dube: It’s outside of fort Collins actually.

[0:19:48] Charlie Hoehn: That’s right, okay.

[0:19:49] Rob Dube: Just up the mountain, yeah. About 20 miles up the mountain and it’s a beautiful property up there and they were teaching base stuff of mindfulness based stress reduction which was created by Jon Kabat-Zinn out of the University of Massachusetts. Jon is a scientist and used meditation as a way to help people reduce stress and found it to be very successful. He’s done a number of studies and has a program that has gotten to be pretty well known at this point. He was actually recently featured I think about a year or so to go on 60 Minutes for the program. Back to my retreats, I struck up a conversation with the teacher and he had mentioned that he goes on these solo silent retreats and I was curious about that. I’ve done a few of those myself. Now I do a combination of silent retreat with the group and then I’ll do one each year by myself for seven to 10 days in length. Now, I find these valuable for a few reasons. It hones in on my practice so for me, I haven’t had these revelations per se, although many people do, many people also just start to gain a better ability to sit on a daily basis and meditate. Because, you’ve gone through this seven or 10 day period of time where you’re doing it for such a long period of time when you sit down for 20 minutes let’s just say. It doesn’t seem that difficult anymore. The other thing that it helps me with is really honing in on being in the present moment right here, right now. Example, I’m with a team member and they’re telling me about a challenge they have. Old Rob might have been thinking about how to help them fix it. As they’re telling me the story, I’m already thinking about solutions. Instead, now, I’m just listening, I’m not coming up with any solutions. My mind is able to stay completely focused on everything that they’re telling me. Then, at the end, we can start thinking about solutions together and usually, this is the amazing thing from a leadership standpoint, usually they have the answer, they just needed to talk it through. As leaders, we so often want to just give them the answer, they’re coming to us, we think we need to tell them how to do it and it’s been really impactful, not just for myself but also for my team members because they end up coming up with the solutions on their own.

[0:22:37] Charlie Hoehn: Man, I wish that what you just said just now was handed to every leader as here’s a more effective way to lead is to be a better listener. It’s challenging if you have that constant chatter up in your mind and you’ve grown accustomed to having people come to you and you assume they’re looking for your solution rather than their own.

[0:23:02] Rob Dube: That’s so true. A few years back, I was sharing some of these insights that I’m sharing with you to the executive director of an organization called The Small Giant Community. She was very curious about it and asked me some questions. Later called me and said, “We’re having a conference coming up in a few months and would you be willing to share what you shared with me on stage, I think it will be very beneficial for the attendees which are mainly leaders within companies or entrepreneurs or business owners?” I said, “No, I’m not qualified to do that but thanks for the offer.” She kept nudging me and so I took that as a personal challenge and I said “Okay, I’ll go up there and I’ll just tell my story and you know what? If one person finds it to be valuable then it was worth it.” To my surprise, after I did my talk which was about 20 minutes. I had many people coming up to me and everything from just basic curiosity to sharing stories of hardships in their lives and wanting to know more about how this might help them to even their own leadership challenges. This went on throughout the rest of the conference and it went on for a full year after the conference, where people were emailing me, calling me, asking me questions, asking me for maybe even advice or you know, asking if I could point them a certain directions, whether it be the books or how to get started and things of that nature. I was blown away by the response of all these participants and people I had come to know and in fact, one of my favorite responses was there was a gentleman who emailed me at three in the morning and he said in his email, I wanted to let you know, I couldn’t sleep tonight so I decided to get up and meditate and before I go back to bed, I wanted to let you know my mind is a lot calmer now, you really made an impact on me. I was blown away by that.

[0:25:19] Charlie Hoehn: That’s amazing.

[0:25:21] Rob Dube: This executive director of the small giants community asked me to speak again at the next year’s conference which I did. Again, the reaction was very similar, a few months later I was on my silent retreat and my mind was going along and I got this idea that this could be a very impactful thing for leaders, for entrepreneurs, business owners and I thought, “Maybe I could share this and maybe I could write a book.” and then I thought “No, I can’t do that, I had never written a book, I’ve never even thought about that.” I kind of let it go and when I came out of the retreat, I was speaking with somebody about meditation who is similar situation, they were curious and they said, you know, you ought to write a book about that. I kind of chuckled and I told my wife, she said, you know, “You ought to try it.” I thought, “Okay, I’ll take that as a personal challenge.” and it was this time last year and I told my wife, what I’m going to do is I’m going to write a few pages and just see how it goes and I’ll share it with you. I did that and I felt like there was a good flow so I kept writing and then I decided I’m going to do this and complete it. I spent this year writing a book which I called Do Nothing - The Most Rewarding Leadership Challenge You Will Ever Take and I answer many of the questions that people have asked me. I interview leaders from around the country that have, are extremely successful.

[0:27:04] Charlie Hoehn: Which leaders come to mind?

[0:27:06] Rob Dube: Sure. One leader that comes in mind is the CEO of Aetna. Mark Bertolini and he has a regular meditation practice which he took on and ultimately rolled out in a sense to his company and when he took over Aetna, the stock price was around $32 per share, it now is around 170 or 180 per share. The culture that he’s brought to the company, obviously it didn’t have all to do with meditation, it was a component of it, but a good number of the 30,000 employees from that company have taken a meditation class. A good number of them have taken on to meditation practice and he likes to say, stock price aside, it’s just easier to work with people now with a company. I love that because we’re just humans doing stuff and you know, why make it harder than we need to? Let’s just get along and have a positive experience with each other. Mark is someone who you know, from a high profile standpoint is a great person to point to. I had these interviews with the different leaders that I profile in the book, I share a lot of the science behind it, there’s been somewhere around 6,800 articles written on the benefits of meditation since 1972 and there are many that I point out in there, at a high level so people could get a good feel for that as well if they want. Kind of the science and facts behind it.

[0:28:38] Charlie Hoehn: Rob, what do you think are the most profound benefits for leaders and entrepreneurs of all the ones that you’ve read about that are backed by science?

[0:28:48] Rob Dube: Well, it starts with awareness and presence. You’re honing in on that practice. It’s much like working out. I’ll use running because I’m a runner and that’s easy for me to talk about it and hopefully people can relate to it. So you start out, you don’t run and you decide you’re going to try running. You start out and you run maybe half a mile or a mile and it’s pretty hard and you have to do that for a period of time and then you work your way up to three or four miles. You might even go run a 5K like three miles and then the next thing you know, you could run five or 10 miles or maybe even a marathon. Some people it’s an ultra-marathon depending, so you work your way up and running becomes easier. So where half a mile or a mile used to be difficult now it’s quite easy. Meditation is very similar. You start off slowly and you start to hone in on the practice, really focusing in my case on my breath. Some people use mantras but I used a breath based meditation. So I am really focusing on my breath and how this translates into our life is that moment between stimulus and response. It’s a millisecond, we don’t have a lot of time to think about it. So through our meditation practice, we are actively honing in on that millisecond. So when I am dealing with a challenging situation, I can react in that millisecond is the difference in how I react between stimulus and response and how I react makes all the difference. In terms of leadership and how the leaders in the book that I profile use it, is their ability to listen deeply and understand emotionally where people are coming from before they speak because the words that we choose and the things that we say affect our team members lives deeply. It could be an innocent comment said in an edgy way where that team member goes home and shares with their family how frustrated they are at work where I can walk away as a leader thinking I said something, I am not even thinking about what I said actually. I didn’t think I said anything wrong and made any sort of difference negatively in that team member’s lives when in fact I did and so our meditation practice can really help us with that. I know it’s helped me, I know it’s helped the leaders that I profile in the book.

[0:31:29] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. What do you say to somebody who is a leader or an entrepreneur and they are thinking, “You know I am a million miles a minute. I am running a fast growing company or there’s a lot of people depending on me, I don’t have time to sit and do nothing because they depend on me”?

[0:32:31] Rob Dube: So in order to speed up, sometimes we need to slow down and my experience and those that I profile’s experience is that we are actually more productive. We are getting more done and we’re doing it better because our minds are clear.

[0:32:47] Charlie Hoehn: Sorry to interrupt Rob but there is a saying that I think of that’s ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’.

[0:32:53] Rob Dube: That’s so good, thank you for sharing that. I haven’t heard it that way before, I really like that. You know, one of the things that a daily practice does and especially with the longer retreats, 7 to 10 days is really helping us to hone in on that moment where we can slow down and ultimately focus. So when we are working on something, we are extremely focused doing it at a really high level and doing it better. So ultimately it becomes much more beneficial and what I see in many of the practitioners, many of the leaders and myself is that we’re actually becoming more successful in many ways because of our practice and it also translates by the way into our personal lives. You know I really feel that I am a better father, I’m a better husband, a better friend, a better family member and I feel better. I am a better person to the people within my community and the people that I interact with day in and day out.

[0:34:00] Charlie Hoehn: I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who’s really by all measures a very successful entrepreneur and he said something that struck me which was he said, “I know everybody says to meditate that there are a lot of benefits and I’m just not ready for it,” what do you say to somebody like that who knows the importance of meditation? Who knows that it could benefit them in a lot of ways but doesn’t necessarily feel the urgency?

[0:34:31] Rob Dube: Well, they might not be ready for it. That’s the simple answer, they might not be. So they know it’s there and when they’re ready, they’ll sit down and try it.

[0:34:42] Charlie Hoehn: Fair enough. So normally I ask about how is this information, how does your message transform to other ideas but I am really curious, you’ve done so much intensive meditation. I am curious, in what surprising ways has it shaped you and transformed you and your life? Ways that you didn’t expect that the listeners may not be able to expect and I mean I have done enough meditation where I’ve had instances that really surprised me. They’ve been a handful of times where I have meditated to the point of having like strange visions or hallucinations while I have my eyes closed. It’s almost like lucid dreaming while you are awake but that’s not really necessarily a transformation. So how is it affected you in letting go of things or attracting things into your life that sort of thing?

[0:35:41] Rob Dube: Well that’s a great question. The first thing that came to my mind is just being in the moment and really enjoying the moment and that doesn’t always mean that wonderful things are happening because I have challenges in my life and that will go on forever but it’s how I can frame what’s going on in that moment and not being concerned about the past and not worrying about the future because there is nothing I can do about the past. I can learn from the past and be wiser which I do but there is nothing I can do to control the future. So all I have is this moment and it’s a precious moment, whatever it is that I am doing, like right now, this is a special moment speaking with you and I am very much in it with you right now and thank you for having me by the way.

[0:36:38] Charlie Hoehn: I’m glad you’re here.

[0:36:39] Rob Dube: And for sharing that, your experience there so that is the first thing that came to my mind.

[0:36:45] Charlie Hoehn: Which is on the surface sounds so simple to almost sound trivial but it is a really deeply profound thing when you realized how often you are worried about the future or depressed about the past and not just there in the moment letting go of whatever story you’re telling yourself in your head but just seeing things as they are.

[0:37:10] Rob Dube: You nailed it.

[0:37:11] Charlie Hoehn: Have you read, Remember, Be Here Now?

[0:37:14] Rob Dube: I have.

[0:37:14] Charlie Hoehn: How did you feel about that book?

[0:37:16] Rob Dube: Well I love all of this content and all that type of book and I mean Be Here Now I think is right in line with what you are you and I are talking about being in the moment and just appreciating it for what it is no matter what it is and so it certainly helped me in so many ways. I think about I have a lot of things going through my mind as I am talking to you and I’m thinking about times like my son was coming home and we were very excited to watch our football team, the Detroit Lions together on TV. And it was at some period during the game, I noticed I was looking at my email on my phone but I caught myself and I thought, “I am somewhere else right now.” I’m not even watching the game, what’s going on? And so I’m human so of course, I get distracted. I am not always in the moment like I should be but that’s the beautiful thing about being here now and being in the moment is you start having that practice as you start to recognize and then you can shift. And so I remember that specifically and that happened fairly recently within the last month and I remembered getting up and putting my phone away and remembering to cherish this moment right now with my son and watching this game and just being really present with him and with what was going on around us.

[0:38:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and that’s really the benefit of meditation right? It’s a practice and so that it carries on in normal life when you’re no longer doing it sitting still with your eyes closed but rather you are in the day to day and that’s what they call mindfulness right? It’s effectively living, breathing, moving meditation.

[0:39:07] Rob Dube: Right, exactly and that’s why you practice and that’s why they call meditation ‘a practice’ because we are practicing. So some of the misconceptions I think that people have is that when they meditate they should stop thinking. So that’s not –

[0:39:23] Charlie Hoehn: Right or they shouldn’t think certain thoughts.

[0:39:27] Rob Dube: Yeah, right like, “Why am I getting so frustrated? I’m meditating right now?” So be with the frustration. Allow it to be with you, don’t push it away just be with it and there’s something very impactful about that in our minds and you’re thinking of maturity at that time. Let’s just say you were sat down and meditating for five minutes. You might be thinking non-stop very fast for four minutes and 57 seconds. It’s very possible and that is an uncommon. We live extremely busy lives and there is so much coming at us very fast with being so connected these days. So this is a time to let those thoughts fly and the awareness piece to it is just trying to recognize that you are thinking and then in my case, I learned to say thinking and then I go back to focusing on my breath until I lose that focus and start thinking again until I notice I am thinking and then I go back to my breath. So it’s just this thing you keep practicing and then you start to notice that. As you mentioned in your everyday life, you start to notice what’s going on and then you take pause. It’s that split second that you do that and so it could be very impactful.

[0:40:47] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so I am really curious how maybe your meditation practice has evolved and so I’ll share how mine has changed over the years. I used to – I still have a bit of type ‘A perfectionism personality’ but it was much stronger years ago and I used to be set on finding the best way to meditate or to meditate really well, which makes me chuckle now. It’s just funny but now, I am more playful with my meditation practice and there is less tension. And I find, I experiment with different ways of meditating, right? So sometimes I’ll do random challenges for myself where I’ll be meditating and trying to bring my breath down into my left toe or something like that or I will be breathing in such a way where I’ll be thinking about breathing up all the air in the entire house and releasing it in different ways and kind of imagine it and stuff like that where I don’t take it too seriously or too rigidly but I am still focusing on my breathing but doing it in a way that’s even enjoyable and playful. So how has your meditation practice changed over the years since you have been doing it for how many years now?

[0:42:20] Rob Dube: Since 2005.

[0:42:23] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s a long time.

[0:42:24] Rob Dube: So that’s 12 years yeah. First of all, I love that story you shared and I think it’s important not to take it too seriously and some do that and get caught up in the fact that they don’t feel like they are doing it properly.

[0:42:38] Charlie Hoehn: Right and I hear that a lot actually. That seems to be one of the most common things I hear is it just becomes another, I don’t know, like either a status symbol or another thing that you have to do really well rather than just – I don’t know like if you took up a sport, a brand new sport, you wouldn’t feel bad for not doing it perfectly right away. You would give yourself some room to mess around and experiment, right?

[0:43:08] Rob Dube: Well said, that is so true and you and I must have similar personality types and when I first started meditating, I searched out a meditation teacher in my area and I went and her name is Donna Rockwell and I went to visit her and so she said, “Okay what would you like to do?” and I said, “I want to learn how to meditate,” and she said, “Well have you ever meditated before?” and I said, “Yes, I think. I don’t think I am doing it right.” And she said, “Well why don’t you tell me what you have been doing?” so I explained it to her. She said, “It sounds like you are doing it right to me” and I said, “Well can you show me?” and she said, “Okay, sure.” So she grabbed a couple of chairs and we sat across from each other and we sat for about five or 10 minutes and she guided me at the beginning and then we were silent and then guided it at the end and then we opened our eyes and kind of sat there for a moment. I looked at her and I said, “So how did I do?” and she said, “What do you mean? You’re fine.” Yeah she said, “You did fine” “So is there anything that you should be explaining to me about things I should have been?” And she said, “No it was fine” and so I said, “Okay great. Thank you and I would like to make another appointment to come back and see you to do this again,” and she said, “I mean you don’t need to do that. You are already doing it just fine.” But that wasn’t enough for me so she said, “If you feel like you need to come back, feel free.” So I came back and we did the same exact thing and it hit me that I was completely overanalyzing everything about this. Now, one thing I have learned over the years, something that is important is your posture and so I have taken that piece of it and I don’t try to be perfect with it. I just try to remember in my case and it’s outlined in the book, how to sit properly and there’s a seven step way. It’s almost like a checklist that you could put yourself that I put myself through that I learned.

[0:45:12] Charlie Hoehn: Now why is that so important? Is it to maximize the breathing and to be fully present with your body or what?

[0:45:20] Rob Dube: The way I learned and I know there are many different ways so it’s different for everybody but the way I learned was you want to be in a state of not too relaxed but not too stimulated either so you try to find a good balance. You want to have a good way of sitting so you can sit for a while. One of the challenges that some people have is just physically sitting and some people do it in a chair. Some people do it on a mat, some people do it – There is this benches that you can purchase. I happen to do it on a mat, on a cushion and it’s a Zafu is what I use and you sit on it and there’s a mat underneath but many people sit in a chair and so it’s important in the way that I learn to take your back off of the chair and sit upright not too rigid, not too soft. So just like find a good balance there and that one enables you to sit for a period of time without getting too antsy or too uncomfortable. That’s a really important thing to kind of work on so like you were talking about sports, you know whether you play tennis or you run or you play basketball or golf, you know people, they use golf as an example. People are always taking lessons to hone in on their proper technique with their swing but yet everybody has an individual way where they kind of go about it at the same time as well. So that could be used as a comparison to how you, definitely understand at least the proper way to sit so you can sit and not get too antsy or get uncomfortable.

[0:46:56] Charlie Hoehn: Rob I’m curious, do you meditate with members of your family?

[0:47:00] Rob Dube: No, I don’t. They know I meditate and my wife meditates using an app. She likes the Meditation Studio App which is a really good one on the app store but we don’t do it together. My kids know that I meditate and I always like to tell the story of when I first started back in 2005. I didn’t really share, this was actually kind of a stuck I had in my head. I didn’t share with my family that I was going to start doing this. I had decided I was going to do it every day and try it out. So I had this little office in my home and sometimes I work from home like many people and they would pretty much know if the door was shut not to bother me but it didn’t stop them necessarily, all the time, but they were pretty good about it and so I decided to close my door and I turn the lights off and sit and start meditating but my mind was going crazy. I’d hear the kids, I’d hear my wife, “Are they going to walk in? Are they going to knock on the door? What am I supposed to do? It’s dark in here, I am sitting on the floor.” You know I had this whole thing playing in my head and it was causing me all these anxiety until I realized, “Why don’t I just tell them what I’m doing so they know and then they won’t bother me unless it’s an emergency?” so I just went to my family and I said, “I am going to try this out and I’m going to see how this works for me. So if you see the door closed then it appears that the lights are off it’s likely that I am meditating. So just don’t knock or don’t barge in but if you do, it’s fine. It’s not the worst thing in the world, I just want you to know you might see me sitting me on the floor with the lights out and so don’t be alarmed by that.” And they thought it was great. They thought it was funny and they have been really great supporters of me over the years and they’ve had their own curiosities and maybe one day it will be useful to them and maybe it won’t.

[0:48:53] Charlie Hoehn: It’s a good thing to be a role model for your kids. I mean I had no idea what meditation even was until I was in my mid-20’s. I had really been exposed to it beyond stories of monks in Southeast Asia doing it. So I think that’s really cool that it’s something that your family knows about first of all and also that’s just becoming much more common in the West. I mean man, we definitely can benefit from it. So we are coming up on the end of the hour, can you give our listeners a challenge? Something they can do this week and I’d imagine a lot of the people who listen to this have experimented with meditation at the very least, have given it a try.

[0:49:39] Rob Dube: Sure, so one challenge I would say is to, and we’re going into the new year so you could take it as a new year’s challenge if you wanted to, is try it for 21 days straight and there’s a good number of apps out there. Meditation Studio App, Headspace, Calm, are a few that come to mind, Insight Timer is another one and some of them will even present their own little game and challenge for you and just try it for 21 days. Many people are aware that that’s the approximate amount of time it takes to develop a habit and so initially, it will be challenging, hence the challenge but stick with it and after that period of time if you’re not finding it useful certainly you’ll make your own decisions in terms of what’s best for you to go forward but give it that full effort and see if you start to notice a little difference and I was like the caveat is you will likely not notice a huge shift. Some people do but if you go in with that expectation it’s going to be tough to fulfill it but what you will notice is little shifts and that’s the magic. The little shifts overtime, it’s a little bit at a time. There’s a great book called Ten Percent Happier that Dan Harris wrote. So very similar you know it is just a little bit at a time, stick with it and over a number of years it will start to notice it’s serving you very well.

[0:51:12] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I fully agree with that the slow build up. One of the things that I encourage or that I double down on what you said, either use an app and what I do that works well for me is in the health app on your iPhone where you can see how many steps a day you’ve taken and that sort of thing, they now have a mindfulness section and so I just enter in my time in there and being able to see on the calendar how many days of the month or the week I’ve done it. Just being able to see that I have done it reinforces the habit and encourages it to keep going and again, I fully agree with you on not having expectations going into it but I will say that one of the benefits that I’ve gotten from it that very few people mention to me what happened is it really feels good. It feels good on a physical level that matches like almost getting a massage. If you are having these deep breaths it stimulates. I think it’s the Vagus nerve, right? And that it feels very good in a way that is very relaxing and positive too.

[0:52:30] Rob Dube: It’s a great point, I know sometimes when I am working later and I get up very early in the morning. So when it’s getting later I am starting to think I am not getting enough sleep as I need and maybe I should just go straight to bed and oftentimes or all the time, I’ll sit and I am thinking, “I really should get to bed, I should really get to bed,” but I’m never disappointed that I sat and meditated and I do 20 minutes at night and 45 minutes in the morning when I get up. And I am not suggesting that needs to be other people’s routine, that is just mine but that 20 minutes in the evening helps me sleep better actually. I think it’s even worthwhile. So I like your comparison to almost like a massage. It does slow me down and slow my mind down a bit.

[0:53:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah absolutely and that 45 minutes in the morning undoubtedly makes your workday better so you are more efficient because you’re less distracted or less likely to get distracted.

[0:53:33] Rob Dube: Yes, it’s definitely a helpful way to start my day.

[0:53:35] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, awesome. Well this has been great. Rob how can our listeners stay connected with you and follow your journey or maybe send you an email thanking you for the episode?

[0:53:47] Rob Dube: Well they can go to donothingbook.com and you’ll find a way to contact me there. You’ll find information obviously about the book. You will see some videos of some talks I have done at TED Talk and you will also find some information about a leadership silent retreat that I organize which is taking place in April, April 23rd to the 26th, and it’s a four day retreat for leaders, entrepreneurs, business owners that really want to either hone in on their practice a little bit deeper or if they’re just getting started, really engulf themselves into the technique and what having a meditation practice can look like. The silence piece of it is about a day and a half and the other parts to it will be some leadership exercises as well as some instruction on how to get off on the right foot.

[0:54:48] Charlie Hoehn: Cool and that’s at the Shambhala Mountain Center?

[0:54:51] Rob Dube: Yes.

[0:54:52] Charlie Hoehn: In Fort Collins or just outside of Fort Collins, one of the most beautiful places in the United States, so that’s great.

[0:54:59] Rob Dube: It’s a special place.

[0:55:02] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Well Rob thank you again, this has been great.

[0:55:05] Rob Dube: Thank you for having me and thank you for sharing your stories on your own experiences. That was really insightful and educational for me so thank you for doing that Charlie.

[0:55:16] Charlie Hoehn: Likewise, yeah my pleasure. Many thanks to Rob Dube for being on the show. You can buy his book, Do Nothing, on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.