Meditation is Linked to Exemplary Performance
Columnist, Alexa Mikhail penned this article in Fortune magazine on January 9, 2024: “Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy’s pregame meditation routine helped lead the Wolverines to victory. Here’s how it works” (https://fortune.com/well/2024/01/09/michigan-quarterback-mccarthy-pregame-meditation-wolverines-victory/). The Wolverines are 2023 national champions. They have just won the 2024 AFC Championship.
In a separate media presentation, McCarthy said he was so impressed with the benefits of meditation that he wants to promote the practice to the rest of the world.
This article should help in that effort.
What’s common between J. J. McCarthy, 2016 World Series Champions, Chicago Cubs, 2013 Super Bowl Champions, Seattle Seahawks, and Patrick Mahomes, Quarterback of Kansas City Chiefs the 2020, 2023 and 2024 Super Bowl Champions ? They all are convinced that yoga/meditation helps them achieve exemplary performance.
There is a logical explanation for their experience; a strong link between meditation and exemplary performance.
Exemplary performance occurs when the processes and transactions are organized and operated in the best possible manner (external excellence), but only provided the emotional excellence of the participants is high (internal excellence).
Higher levels of emotional excellence translates into a shift from negative emotions towards positive emotions and the capacity to remain centered in the presence of extenuating circumstances, but it is not an intellectual exercise. Just do a thirty-day self-assessment and you will be convinced of this claim.
For example, if you stub your toe, what is your reflex reaction? Or, you are driving a car obeying all the traffic laws and someone cuts into your lane nearly causing an accident, what is your instant reaction?
The lesson here is that the required positive changes have to come about from within. And meditative practices bring about the positive changes from within.
The link of exemplary performance to emotional excellence is not limited to athletics. It cuts across disparate activities of life. Let us take an example.
Mumbai’s Dabbawalas are a group of 5,000 semiliterate lunchbox delivery boys in the Metropolis of Mumbai, India, who pick up 200,000 lunch boxes a day, six days a week, from people’s homes in the suburbs and deliver them to their clients in downtown Mumbai, producing 1 defect in six million deliveries (late delivery; wrongful delivery) according to Forbes which classified theirs as a six sigma operation. And they have been at it since 1890!
A large number of luminaries and organizations have paid Dabbawalas a visit with the desire to learn how they achieve such astounding performance in the hope of replicating it. They include, King Charles, Sir Richard Branson, Harvard, Columbia, CBS, BBC, CNN and scores of others.
How do they achieve such incredible performance?
The explanation is counterintuitive. Not only is the lunchbox pickup-to-delivery process organized and operated the six sigma way, the emotional excellence of Dabbawalas is high. They are all Varkaris (pilgrims) who travel a distance of 200 km on foot from one temple-town to another every year.
The feelings of Shraddha (faith), Bhakti (devotion), Vishwas (Trust, Confidence), and Samarpan (surrender), which the Dabbawalas possess in abundance, do not come naturally to everyone. Meditation is a tool to achieve higher levels of emotional excellence for the rest.
The Dabbawalas senior management personnel were pleasantly surprised to learn the real reason why their performance is as good as it is when I visited them in 2019. We have since then entered into an MOU to explain to the world how exemplary performance becomes possible and can be achieved.
Please see this article, Disruptive Innovation (https://mumbaidabbawala.in/transformational-framework/?id=76).
This discovery may be formally stated as follows: Exemplary performance cannot be achieved in the absence of an adequate level of emotional excellence even with the best possible strategies, equipment and technologies. Boost emotional excellence and the performance will zoom.
Emotional excellence has nothing to do with race, religion, gender or national origin.
McCarthy says he discovered meditation when he was having mental health issues, but the benefits of meditation are not limited to mental health alone. They include health & wellness in general, exemplary performance in all aspects of life, leadership, and less individual and societal discord and violence.
It is important to insure that meditative practices are devoid of specific religious affiliation.
For additional details, see the author’s article, The Secret of Exemplary Performance (https://www.aacsb.edu/insights/articles/2019/08/the-secret-of-exemplary-performance), in BizEd (now called Insights) which is a publication of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the body that accredits Business School curricula in the United States.
About the Author
Pradeep B. Deshpande is Professor Emeritus in and former Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Louisville. He is also president of Six Sigma and Advanced Controls based in Louisville, Kentucky. He is an author of eight books and over one hundred fifty articles in reputed journals that include Proc. Royal Society–UK, Chemical Eng. Progress, Ind. Eng. Chem. Proc. Des Dev, Chem. Eng. Science, among several others, and is a recipient of several international awards. He is a Life Member and a Fellow of International Society for Automation (ISA). Contact him at pradeep@sixsigmaquality.com.
