Author: Henriette

The Benefits Of Meditation

Posted on by Henriette

I started meditating circa 2010. Six months later I noticed fundamental changes in myself. My baseline anxiety went down by a very noticeable degree. Large crowds no longer freaked me out. I slept better. I quit smoking. And tests and exams became a breeze.

Before discovering meditation, tests were the bane of my existence. University level math is not a joke, and I’d had panic attacks in a bunch of tests. Always math. In one of those, I had to walk out after writing only my name and a scribble of a matrix. Not being able to breathe in a large lecture hall is horrible.

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Emotional Immaturity

Posted on by Henriette

We spend years in school sitting behind a desk learning how to read and do math but have no capacity to uncover our buried emotional drivers. There is a reason for this. It is difficult. Reading and math are important. No arguments there. But our emotional immaturity shows up everywhere we look: Politics. Business. Relationships. Health.

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No Progress Without Presence

Posted on by Henriette

Years ago I wrote a post about how we should favour process over progress. In that article I make the argument that we should not aim for predefined goals to get to some predefined top of the mountain. We don’t always know how long something will take. And we don’t know how the journey will look, so our best strategy is to settle in and focus on what we are doing in the moment.

People—especially large institutions and organisations—fixate on progress to the point where they no longer realise that their checkbox approach has nothing to do with real work. Peter Thiel makes a similar point in Zero To One. Here’s a quote:

“In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work.”

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Create From A State Of Presence

Posted on by Henriette

I once heard Brandon Sanderson (author of The Way of Kings) tell aspiring writers that they should not think of their first novel as the product. Instead, he said, you should think of yourself as the product. His argument went something like this: The first book that you write won’t be good. No matter what you do. You don’t have enough skill to make it good yet. But each story that you write, makes you a better writer. And so, even if your first stories are not publishable, you can rest assured that you are becoming a better writer by writing them.

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