Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, and want to improve overall as a person, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Today, I have the privilege of being joined by Australian Tom Cronin.
00:28
He is a meditation teacher, the creator of the movie, The Portal, and a coach. And he's here to first of all, bust the myths that you've had about meditation before, and so many other lessons and ways in which meditation has changed his life. And before I go any further, please help me to welcome Tom. Hello. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me along today. Thank you for being on our show. I'm really excited about our conversation today. So first of all, give us a little bit of your background.
00:58
Well, I started out my career initially in finance, very much like Wolf of Wall Street if anyone's seen the film or read the book. I started actually my career as a broker on a massive trading room floor in 1987, the same year that Jordan Belfort from Wolf of Wall Street started his career. So I was 19, he was 22. And that started a sort of journey down a rabbit hole into finance. It was like the Wild West back then in the 80s. And that led to very extreme karmic responses in my body. I had a lot of panic attacks and anxiety, a lot of addictions at that point.
01:27
I'd been in the industry for a few years after I started and this started to show up in my body, a lot of addictions and a lot of crazy times. We were on the day, the job, we were just frenetic and crazy with lots of adrenaline and in the evening we were out partying and drinking and doing all sorts of crazy things. By the age of 29, a nervous breakdown and so my system collapsed under the load that I was putting it through.
01:49
And at that point, the doctors had put me on medication. I was sent to psychiatrists and psychologists. I was actually put on suicide watch for a while. It was a pretty dark time. But what happened was that interestingly, during that time, I had to take time off work and I was sitting at home watching a TV documentary. It was about a big property developer here in Australia. And they were talking about his success. And a very small section of that story, it was really tiny, about two minutes, where he was talking about how we used meditation, but he actually said transcendental meditation.
02:18
And they showed him in a pinstripe suit meditating, sitting in a chair. Now I kind of vaguely thought of meditation or heard of it in the distance somewhere, you know, my years, but never really understood much about it. But I always associate it with Buddhist monks and temples and monasteries and stuff, but here was this businessman in a suit meditating, sitting in a chair, not in lotus with hands in mud or anything. And it was like this epiphany. It was like a light bulb moment. I knew immediately that that's what I needed in my life. And it was actually an interesting thing. I picked up.
02:47
Some people won't know what I'm talking about here, but I picked up the Yellow Pages phone book, which is the old Google. I grew up with that, yeah. Yeah, exactly, right? When my dad needed a plumber or some electrician, he said to my mom, honey, get the Yellow Pages. Yeah, there's no Google, right? So that was our Google. We opened a big book. I remember opening up to M for meditation. And I still recall actually looking down the page and there was all these different centers. The one stood out, because in the old days, you used to be able to highlight a business by putting it in red, and they paid extra.
03:17
for getting their business in red. Right. In bold red there, it said transcendental meditation. And I was just like, wow, it sounds so cool, like this transcending idea. And so I tried a lot of the different techniques, a lot of centers, and that was really the starting point for my journey into meditation. Now, just to cut that story short, I learned to meditate, all my anomalies went away. Like I went off the drugs, stopped seeing psychiatrists, stopped seeing doctors, and I'm not recommending that to anyone. It's just what I did in my journey.
03:43
Because I found that the meditation was having such an incredible impact on me, that the need for those things just wasn't there. I just found that I got better and better and better, felt happier and happier and happier, slept better. All my addictions started to drop away. And I went back into that career for 16 more years, working as a broker in the same job, but without having that extreme stress response. And then eventually I decided to leave that to become a meditation teacher and a coach and working with a lot of top companies around the world now. So many working people are having burnout.
04:13
Which I think when you say you have a nervous breakdown, that's more or less exactly what they go through when they say, I was burned out and I left the job and I was in hospital. Is it because we are chasing all this stuff that we consider success and it will bring us the happiness and what we've been told we are supposed to chase in order to prove ourselves that we are successful, that we happy, that we have all this stuff that we're supposed to get? Yeah, absolutely. You know, our measure for success is definitely in the wrong place.
04:42
and that's leading to things like burnout. We have a very unhappy, anxious, depressed society. We're very much normalised to this way of living. But that's because the inherent code that if I acquire more or experience more, then I will get more fulfilment. And we're gonna have to learn the hard way unless we learn before that, that that's not actually the path to progress, that's not the path to fulfilment or success. So what we've been coded with is what we call outcome-oriented fulfilment, where my outcome is determined
05:11
by my acquisitions or my experiences or actions. So if I get this or if I get that, if I get a job there, if I marry this person there, if I get these kids here, then that will lead me to happiness. That will lead me to fulfillment. And it's a deep code. We don't realize we've got that code, but it's the one that we operate with predominantly. Now that leads us to driving and pushing ourselves beyond the normal limits of what we would be happy to do so that we can get that character that's dangling in front of us. What we've got to do is we've got to reset that code and bring it back to self-referred fulfillment.
05:41
which is an innate state that we have within us that's completely liberated and free of the need of the acquisition or the action. What that means is that love, joy and bliss is a state within us that's always waiting there to be percolating and bubbling up within us. But what we have is that it's suppressed and drowned in the cortisol, adrenaline, everything that we're flooding our body with to try and get the acquisition or the action. So yeah, we've got to recode our society. And that's a big part of what I'm trying to do these days. So disclaimer, we are not discouraging anyone
06:10
being ambitious, you went back to Wall Street after discovering meditation. Yeah, and that's why I get a lot of corporate gigs because I'm not saying leave your job. Right. No one has to leave their job. No one has to leave the city. No one has to shave their head and go to a monastery. It's about integration. You know, I'm married with children and I live in a lovely suburb. I have a Tesla. I like good things. I like to travel and I like to experience life. It's not about excluding yourself. It's about putting the horse before the cart and finding fulfillment first and then expressing that through action. So we still act.
06:39
We still move, you know, I'm running multiple businesses. I produced a film, I have six books out. So you'll find you'll actually have better action that will be coming from fulfillment, not action that's being driven for fulfillment. And I love the quote from Oprah Winfrey, who's a very avid meditator of the technique that I use and teach. And she said, it's only from that place. Can you create your best work and your best life?
07:02
What she's saying here is establish the stillness and the silence first, establish that deep connection from within first. It's like a tree that grows roots first before it grows up first. And the reason why it grows down first is so it can be stable and nourished before it goes up. And what a lot of us are doing is just looking at the outside world first and having very unstable inside world. And so therefore when someone doesn't like us or puts a comment on our Instagram post that we don't like, we get toppled over like a tree that doesn't have a deep root base.
07:32
And so that's why Oprah says, you know, from that place, establish the stillness, establish the silence, establish the inner fulfillment, and then go into action because it will be very different action after that. You were mentioned earlier that you also at first associated meditation with the Buddhist religion, which I think a lot of us did at first, we used to think, oh, I'm raised Christian, this is not for me, but let's bust some of the myths that people have about meditation. Yeah. Firstly, they usually associate meditation with the religion.
08:01
And it's funny, my mum was having anxiety attacks at one point in her life. This was after I'd learned to meditate. And I said, mum, you know, you really should maybe try this meditation. It was a game changer for me with my anxiety and depression. And it's just science-based about how it calms the nervous system and calms the body and changes that biochemistry. You know, she loved going to church and she was very Catholic and connected with Jesus and Mary. And she goes, I'll try it if, if I don't lose my connection with Jesus and Mary. I said, not that anything at all. Deepen your connection with Jesus and Mary. So firstly, we've got to.
08:31
demystify the idea that there's a religious association and it's compartmentalized, that if I'm in this religion, therefore I can't have that practice. What we find is that people of some sorts of religion, they actually find that meditation, which is just a science-based process to make them feel calmer and happier. It actually allows them to deepen their connection, whether it's Islam or whether it's Christianity or whether it's Buddhism, whether it's Hindu, it doesn't matter, or if it's no religion at all.
08:57
enlivens and accentuates all areas of positivity in your life, whatever your areas are. So if you're in a relationship, it will enliven that. If you're in a religion, it will enliven that. If you're at work, it will enliven that. As you said, I went back to work for 16 more years. It enlivened my work as a broker. So that's the first thing that it doesn't have to be exclusive. It's very much inclusive. And secondly, a lot of us associate in the early days like I did with meditation as a
09:28
Don't walk bare feet and live in a hut. Yeah, enjoy your Gucci shoes or your ASICs or whatever you like to wear. So it's about appreciating, for me anyway, and this is subjective, purely from my perspective, for some people, they might find that they want to renounce things because they find them a distraction. And that's totally cool as well. That's why monks, yeah, that's why monks will do that. They don't want to be distracted by those things that will pull them away from their inner practice, their inner world. And so that's why they...
09:57
withdraw from any of those distractions for them, Instagram and Bitcoin and you know, the Kardashians, it just doesn't mean anything to them. They're much more interested in can I connect with God or source or divinity or stillness. But there's a way to integrate both of those where when we have a daily practice, so mine's morning and evening, and what it does is it enlivens all the things that I'm experiencing in my outer world. And so we find that we get this tantalizing interaction with life itself, and lovemaking becomes less of
10:25
two people's bodies rubbing up against each other, but more of a dance that we have with all experiences of life, whether it's eating ice cream or looking at a sunset or holding your child in your lap that's just grazed their knee. All of life experiences become richer and more fulfilling. We talk a lot about the subconscious mind on this show. How do you think meditation helps with us connecting a little more with the subconscious mind, does it? Well, firstly, I'd like to...
10:54
go a little bit further than the subconscious mind. We have the conscious mind which is where we're thinking. Right. We have the subconscious mind which is kind of like sort of dream states abstract sort of realm of thought we're not really familiar with but it's a deeply coded part of the mind. But we've got the pure conscious mind as well. So pure conscious mind is the mind that is expansive and beyond the brain itself. The subconscious mind is still within the coded brain. It's still a function of neural pathways. So we've got conscious mind which is my thinking
11:23
We call these vasanas where I have 50,000 thoughts a day. And these vasanas are tendencies of my mind. My mind has these patterns and these tendencies to think in a particular way. And we all have these codes or belief systems that can be generational passed down through your genetics and they can also be social. So they're conditioned into through the society that you're brought through, which school you went to, which suburb you grew up in, what your cultural background is, all that sort of stuff. So that's all in the conscious mind, the thinking mind.
11:51
Subconscious mind is generally a lot of conditioning and coding that happens when we're sort of not to seven and that sets us up with sort of these much deeper belief systems and some of that can be generation as well, but it's still an influence in the way we think. Now pure conscious mind is the realm of consciousness itself that doesn't have any of the thoughts in it. And it's important with meditation that we go deeper than the subconscious mind to the actual pure conscious mind, which is where I'm not the thinker, I'm consciousness watching the thinker.
12:20
And this is in Sanskrit is called Turiya, T-U-R-I-Y-A, and your audience can Google that or Wikipedia that. And Turiya in Sanskrit means the fourth, which means the fourth state. So we've got thinking mind, deep sleep mind, which is an unconscious mind, and then we've got dream state mind. Now the fourth state is where I'm awake and I'm alert, but I'm not thinking. And this is pure consciousness in that it doesn't have future or past thoughts. It doesn't have conditioned thoughts. It doesn't have programmed thoughts.
12:49
because there's no thoughts in that realm. It's just awareness itself. And so it's the quiet watchfulness of my thinking mind that allows us to be sovereign and empowered because even in the subconscious mind, we're still not totally sovereign and empowered because we're still being influenced by the code that went into the subconscious mind. Before, yeah. Yeah, before. So when we go even deeper, so imagine the ocean, the surface of the ocean waves that are peaks and troughs that's good and bad, high and low, bipolarized experience of life.
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And that ocean is rippling because something's affecting it, the wind and the currents and the boats moving along it and high and low pressure systems. So it's being impacted and influenced. The subconscious mind is like the currents that move beneath the waves. There's still movement and action. But the pure conscious mind is the very depth of the ocean that's deep and still. And it's the body of that depth in the ocean that's actually supporting the subconscious and the conscious mind. And so until we really access that deeper layer of pure conscious mind...
13:48
the deep Noah, the deep wisdom, the deep silence. Do we really find liberation and freedom? Wow, this is actually the first time I've heard of the pure conscious one, going deeper than the subconscious. Yeah, a lot of people are just simply on the planet right now, unaware of that experience. And I teach meditation, I'm teaching today, I was teaching yesterday. And you know, my students come out of the practice and this is why the transcending meditations are so much more important.
14:14
than visualisational guided meditations because they're the only ones that will get you to the pure conscious mind. Most guided meditations are just getting you to work in the conscious mind, that's the surface mind. They don't even get deep enough to the subconscious mind. And Joda Spencer is doing great work getting people into the subconscious mind. My favourite guy. Yes. Yeah, he's amazing, right? He's a lot more in the subconscious mind. And then Transcendental Meditation or Vedic Meditation gets you into the pure conscious mind. So when my student came out of meditation yesterday, they were like, I went into a void.
14:44
I don't know where it was, but it was like this big spacious experience. And so they're in the pure conscious mind at that point. They're beyond their physical limitation, their mental limitation and their emotional limitation, which are forms. And they went into the field of formlessness, which is pure consciousness. When he does the brain scans, I think those are the states that people go into in his workshops, like I think he has about a week, four day workshops. That's right. That's exactly how he describes it.
15:13
It's almost like you're not here physically in the brain at least. That's right. Yeah. Wow. Amazing stuff. So tell us about the corporate work that you do, because that's another thing as well, we always think, okay, meditation is something more spiritual, you know, my boss is not interested in stuff like that. So how is it that you can merge your corporate work with meditation? Obviously, understanding our audience is really important. And for me, it's not so much what I know, what I teach is more about what my client needs.
15:41
And so I firstly established with my corporate clients, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Qantas, Union Bank of Switzerland, big companies around the world and small companies as well and even non-for-profits is really getting deep into what are their problems, what are their pain points? And what we first established is that their staff are stressed, they're overwhelmed, they're not having great adaptive capacity. And when we've got a world that requires increasing adaptive capacity, that's the ability to adapt quickly, but you have limited adaptive capacity because you're stressed.
16:10
that creates a huge divide and that's where we get major stress fractures happening in our companies and in our society. So giving people greater adaptive capacity, giving people greater brain functionality, giving people greater sleep, giving people greater biochemical component in their body so more oxytocin, melatonin, serotonin, less cortisol and adrenaline. Once they give them the science and the stats and the numbers, then they really can see that there's a powerful science behind this process.
16:37
The first thing I do is when I do a talk or presentation is give them the studies, the science, the stats, so they can intellectualize why this is a good thing. You know, the first thing we need to do is lead the horse to water and inspire them. And then the second thing is hopefully they're inspired enough to then want to try and drink the water from the cup. So yeah, and nourish themselves themselves. So that's really the two step process is I generally provide a talk of inspiration and motivation and then secondly, give them the technique.
17:05
Once they get the technique, it validates it there and then in the experience in the workshop. So I'll give them a little taste of it, only just sort of 10 minutes. And most people come out of those sessions going, wow, I actually noticed that. Like I feel different. I fell asleep or I feel calmer or I feel more relaxed. And so that validates all the information that I've just given them. Inspire them first definitely and give them some inspiration behind it. If you have an organization, you remember people go for the strategic getaways.
17:33
Should they wait to go in a strategic getaway as a team to call you so that you can come and help them meditate or do you actually do that while they're at work? They can do that as well. Yeah, while they're at work, we don't wanna have to wait for some exotic location to go to the Bahamas so that we can finally find peace with the practice. One thing that I really teach is the integratedness of this. This is not about compartmentalizing it into.
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times when I need to be in a particular location before I can start doing this, like a nice seaside village in Mexico. It's really about, can I put my pens and computer down? And can I just go into the boardroom or go into my car in the car park or go into the park down at Central Park or Chicago, a main park in the city? And just close my eyes and safely, if I can close my eyes safely, go to a church, anywhere where you can sit safely and close your eyes and do a practice that I teach, then.
18:25
just do that for 10-20 minutes once in the morning once in the afternoon and your life will completely change. Speaking of changing lives, do some of your clients see a positive change in their personal lives as well? Yeah, it's phenomenal how much. Like I said, it enlightens every aspect of your life. Now you think about a lot of relationships are actually not as bad as people think. They're just two very stressed people. You know, a lot of people are seeing, I've got a friend that's seen relationship counselor for many many years and
18:51
It's funny because they're very resistant to learning to meditate, but they don't have a relationship problem. They have a stress problem because when we're stressed, we're in sympathetic nervous system. And when we're in sympathetic nervous system, we're going to produce cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and we're not going to produce serotonin and oxytocin and melatonin, the three biochemicals for sleep, love and happiness. And so if you're coming home from a crappy day at work and you're walking into the house, it's very hard for you to be endearing, to be kind, to be gentle, to be loving and to think about the other.
19:20
Stress creates narcissism and egocentricism because we're obsessed about our own problem. And it's very hard for us to consider or to see others. And this is why we have a very egocentric and even narcissistic world right now. And that's because we're simply stressed. And so if we can, at the end of the day, just calm your mind and go into a meditation experience. When we walk in the front door, it's kind of like having a wash. You've just washed out all that negative energy. You've recalibrated your state. You're vibrating at a higher frequency and you've got greater capacity to give.
19:50
and to serve and to share. And so it makes you just a more wonderful person to be around. It doesn't mean you're going to be perfect by all means. You're still going to have challenges. None of us are. And so, you know, I still have my own issues and challenges, but it just allows us to recenter, recalibrate and reconnect, particularly as a couple. You know, we can be very much in different emotional states throughout the day, depending on what each person is going through. But when you can sit on a sofa at the end of the day.
20:17
and just meditate together, what it does is it centralizes things. It brings you connected because you normalize this frequency at a higher level and you break free of the emotional traction that you've had from your daily experiences. Because you're having a more unified experience because you've just meditated together, it brings greater harmony in your relationship. So are you saying because you know, the divorce rate, I think, is more than 50 percent. So are you saying that's just a whole lot of stressed people?
20:44
Yeah, because if we look at things like, let's just say, domestic violence, that would be stress, alcoholism, that would be stress, because we're looking to distract ourselves, we're looking to smother something that we're not feeling good about ourselves. Drug use, again, that would be from stress. All these things come all the way back to, are we feeling deeply connected? Are we feeling fulfilled within ourselves? Are we feeling high levels of oxytocin and serotonin in our bloodstream? Are we feeling lots of loveless and joy in our heart?
21:12
that's what meditation will give us. But if we're not feeling that, then it's gonna be very hard to sustain a beautiful, loving relationship. Because like you said, you bring all your emotions from outside and you lay them onto this other person. And obviously they're gonna be resistant and start going haywire as well. Yeah, it just causes disconnection, discord, and without a tool to bring you together, it's gonna make it very hard to move forward, I think. So talk to us about the movie, The Portal. Yeah, I was inspired because of
21:40
what meditation did for me to help me move through crisis. It really helped me not just move through the crisis, but up level as a result of the crisis. And I started to realize that crisis is a mechanism for change, it's a tool of evolution. And in Sanskrit, as I did a lot more research, there's a beautiful word for crisis called rashi, R-A-S-H-I, where rashi is, it's a fork in the road, it's a bifurcation point where something either breaks down or breaks through.
22:07
And it means that we can't continue on the current trajectory. The current trajectory for most people we can continue on, but it just things get worse and worse. But a rash or a crisis is where you can't continue on. Things are either going to go into divorce or you break through to a new level. You go into bankruptcy or you go up to a new level. Your civilization collapses like Easter Island or the Mayans or the Aztecs, or you go up to a new level. And so crisis is an opportunity.
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to up level if you're aware and adaptable enough to realize that. And so we decided to make a film around that and how meditation plays an integral role in expanding our mind, breaking free of the thing that put us into the crisis in the first place, which is a mindset. And when we meditate, we get into that pure conscious mind, we start to see much more clearly what's going on and why it's going on and then move beyond that to a higher level.
22:59
And we look at that individually through six individual lives that are going or have gone through their crisis and use meditation to get through it. And we look at three futurists that look at humanity as a whole on a macro perspective and why we're on a trajectory to our own crisis. And the pandemic wasn't a crisis, that was just a difficult moment in time that was there to teach us certain lessons. And I don't think we've learned them. The GFC was another moment in time that was to teach us important lessons and adapt and change, but I don't think we learned that lesson either.
23:27
And so what happens is if you ignore the lessons, the crises will get bigger and bigger until eventually they become choiceless. A breakthrough or breakdown will have to happen at that particular point. So what we present in the film is that we're on a trajectory for an impending crisis of gargantuan proportions if we don't adapt and learn before time. And my feeling is that I don't think we will and that we will have to face a major crisis. And it could be...
23:54
not to frighten the audience, but it could be quite substantial. The pandemic wasn't substantial enough to make us change. Ooh, that doesn't sound good because a lot of us are barely coping as it is with the pandemic and the changes it has brought. And I know that, especially as humans, we have this comfort zone and the way you describe it sounds like it's not even comfortable as well, that when it comes to the comfort zone, you think, oh, that's the devil I know. When you say, you know, the fork, whether you choose this path, the trajectory you're going on or something has to change.
24:24
We fear change because you feel like the devil I know is a little more comfortable. It's tough, but I can deal with it because I know it by now. From what you're saying, that's not the best option. Rather start to go towards the route that leads to the change, which is the scary part. Yeah, Tim Ferris actually said, people would rather be unhappy than face change. And the reason why meditation can play such an integral part in this process is because when we transcend the thinking mind and the world of duality,
24:54
and we connect with a part of us that is untouchable by the relative world, that's the world outside of us. And it's a fearless place of consciousness itself, which is us. And there's a deep lovingness and a deep blissfulness and a deep peacefulness. And when we start to connect with that part of us, that fear doesn't exist within, because fear is only in the ego, and the ego is in duality, which is me and the outside world. But when we transcend that in our meditation and start to stabilize that,
25:23
part of us, then we start to have greater fearlessness. We'll still have some egos so that I still have some fear in myself because there's still some ego, right? There's still Tom there. But I have greater capacity to go into adaptive experiences because I'm connecting more and more with the part of me where fear doesn't even exist. And that's pure consciousness itself. Or you could call it divinity, source, love, God, whatever you want to call it. But there's a part of us that's omnipresent. So it's part of all of us that fear doesn't touch.
25:53
And when we stabilize and operate from that place, which is what the place Oprah is talking about, then you'll find immense adaptive capacity and you'll find, why am I in this shitty relationship? Why am I in this shitty job? Why am I doing these things? Like, this doesn't make sense. I'm just going to go and do that. And there's no fear around that change. And that makes us more adaptable, which is what I'm trying to teach with companies. If your staff are struggling with changes because they're lacking adaptive capacity, because they're afraid of the unknown, we've got to get them into that space where fear doesn't even touch them.
26:22
And then they'll just go, yeah, I've got this incredible creative idea. Let's just go and do it. Wow. That's exactly the world I want to live in. What would you summarize is your mission? Ultimately, I set up the Stillness Project and the tagline in the Stillness Project was to inspire a billion people to meditate daily. We can talk about bringing change to the world, but if we have people stuck in their thinking and subconscious mind, their conscious and subconscious mind, that's deeply conditioned and coded to act in a particular way, that's riddled with fear.
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narcissism, it's going to be very hard for them to make changes in their life. But if we meditate, what I find is people become a lot more adaptive. So for me, rather than trying to create change in the world, I'm much more inspired to get people to meditate because the change will naturally come from that. Right, it starts from within. That's right. So give us three things starting today. If somebody thinks, okay Tom, this sounds great. I want to know should I do it 10 minutes a day, morning and evening?
27:17
Should it be longer, but I don't have time. Will it be effective with the five minutes? What is it that a lot of people, when they think about meditation, how long should they do it for? How often should they see changes? If they start to have thoughts, is it working? All the fears that they have and then end up thinking, I shouldn't even try. To simplify it, let's just give people three simple ideas. Number one, find a technique that you resonate with and that you enjoy doing.
27:44
If you don't enjoy it, you're just simply not going to do it. We don't like doing things we don't like doing. So for me, when I did my research, there was a lot of meditations that were long, that were hard, they weren't really enjoyable. And that's when I found Vedic meditation or transcendental meditation. I found it effortless, easy, and very, very pleasurable. Secondly, if you can, ideally learn from someone that's qualified in the art of meditation, that's going to give you ongoing support with your practice.
28:11
Just trying to meditate on your own is very, very difficult. It's like going against a very strong headwind. If you can be in a community and with a teacher that's gonna mentor and guide you and offers ongoing support, whether it's on Zoom or whether it's in person in the local center, then that would be number two in the process. Three will be to allocate roughly around 20 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes. Five minutes is not gonna be enough. It's not gonna have significant impact for you to quantify it.
28:40
and we want to be able to quantify it. If you can't quantify or recognize tangible results, you're just simply not gonna do it. So doing one minute, two minute, five minutes, it's gonna mean nothing to you. You will significantly notice change if you do 20 minutes twice a day. Now, some of the people listening right now will go, there's no way I'm gonna get time for that. And I was the same. And that's because number four, we need to prioritize feeling fulfilled first as a...
29:09
priority in life rather than filling fulfilled second after the action or the acquisition. So this is a deep read code on our belief systems about what fulfillment is because a lot of people are going to think well you're saying 20 minutes twice a day I've got too many things that I have to do in my day and the reason why I do all those things is because they help me get fulfilled. But the big question is are you fulfilled? And so what we've got to do is we're to reframe what fulfillment is and where we get it from. A lot of people think fulfillment comes from acquisitions
29:39
Yet we're doing acquisitions and actions for many, many years now and hasn't led to fulfillment. It just leads to a very burnt out, overwhelmed, stressed and anxious society. What we have to do is reframe this, that fulfillment comes from within. We've heard that so many times, but we don't really connect with that. And so if we can allocate, and this is what I was struggling with when that teacher told me 20 minutes morning and evening, twice a day, once in the morning when you wake up, once in the afternoon, sometime before dinner. I was like, dude, I'm a busy broker. There's no way I can...
30:07
Yet that amount of time, I'm like a busy person, I'm important. But I sat with that for a while and I looked at the science and I thought, well, he's kind of onto something here. I'm literally doing all these things. I'm on an almost seven figure salary. I've got, you know, beautiful five million dollar home and yet I'm miserable. I want to commit suicide. I'm on antidepressants. I'm anxious and depressed and not sleeping. So I worked out that my day comprised of 24 hours like everyone else's and each hour has three portions of 20 minutes in it.
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And so that meant that my day has 72 20 minute pieces of pie, like a pie chart. And in that pie chart, every little pie, 72 20 minute pieces of pie are allocated towards me finding fulfillment and yet I wasn't fulfilled and yet this person was saying, if I take two out of those 72 and put them aside for meditation, then I'll be more fulfilled. Yeah. It was like, okay, that's amazing. That's only two out of 72. That's nothing. Right. So.
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I thought, well, the only way I'm going to know this is by doing my own research. And so I took two out of 72 and I made it unconditional for many weeks. And still to this day, 26 years later, it's still unconditional because I could see and quantify the change that was happening in my life. And so to start off with, I just went, okay, just for two weeks, I'm going to make this unconditional, I'm going to do two out of 72. That's one in the morning. When I wake up six o'clock, one in the afternoon, let's just say six o'clock again, and I'm going to meditate for 20 minutes.
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And it was an absolute game changer. As Oprah Winfrey says about her company as well. They all meditate in her company. Nine o'clock. They all meditate. Four o'clock. They all meditate. She said it's completely changed her company. The same feedback you've received from your corporate clients as well. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us a little about your books and where we can purchase them. And then afterwards you tell us where to find you on social media. So first let's start with the books. Yeah. So you can find everything that I do at TomCronin.com. That's probably like a central hub for.
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the film, my books, my retreats, my coaching, my meditation programs. And then secondly, they can find me on social media and anyone can reach out to me. I'm very responsive. I love getting messages from people and that's at Tom Cronin on Instagram. And that's probably the main place where you'll find me. Okay. This has been wonderful, Tom. And before you go, one last piece of wisdom that we should take away from this episode in summarized in one sentence. It's a difficult time that we're going through. It requires a lot of
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change, a lot of adaptive capacity. And a lot of us are feeling very unhappy, very challenged, very overwhelmed, burnt out and tired. But that's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to bring things back to simplicity, to connect inwards to the inner space, not be afraid of that inner space, but to find the richness, the love, the joy that's there, and not get distracted by the outer world.
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you'll enjoy the outer world more when you connect with that inner space. But this is a time that's guiding us inward, not pulling us outward. And we should be listening to that. Words of wisdom from Tom Cronin, tomcronin.com. You will find all this information from his website at Tom Cronin on Instagram. If you want to learn more about meditation, how it can transform your life, both professionally and personally. Thank you so much, Tom, for being here today.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me along today. Lovely chat.