Noticing the Little Things with Nick Ratcliffe

For today’s episode, we are doing something a little different. Today I have a little mini interview for you with my friend Nick, a business consultant, who has been a committed meditator for almost 20 years but unlike our previous guests, he’s not a meditation teacher, not yet at least. I have a few of these mini-interviews lined up, in order to give you a really down to earth viewpoint of regular people who are simply incorporating meditation into their daily lives and staying committed to it. So let’s see what we can learn from Nick today. So why do you meditate? As a businessman, it’s all about stress release. It keeps me calm How regularly do you meditate and how long each time? It’s wonderful that I can also do it with my eyes open. So I can meditate while driving in the car to my business appointments. I like to try to get there 10 minutes early so I can then sit in the car and meditate before going into my meeting. Really I’m meditating off and on all day. "However at the start, I wasn’t that good. As you get better, as you get used to it, it becomes a nice thing to do. Then you want to do it, rather than seeing it as a chore. Then when you want to do it, you want to do it more and more." Spot the moment Nick accidentally says medicate instead of meditate! What made you become more and more committed to closing your eyes? It became nice to notice the gaps in the day, to stop and smell the roses. To notice the wonderful things all around you that we so often miss when we’re too busy or stresses. I just started noticing things that I would have walked past in the past. What is the biggest impact that meditation has had in your life? Better relationships. It’s nice just to let go of how things are supposed to look and just see what happens next with no expectation. When you take that into relationships, you don’t get cross or upset so often, it makes things that much easier. What brings you joy? Nature, and experiencing everything as richer and calmer with more peace and gentleness. What does Daring to be Happy mean to you? If I asked a whole room of businesspeople about their stress levels, the idea of them considering learning to meditate might really challenge them. So daring to be happy to me means just giving it a shot and see what happens. Thank you Nick, for sharing your meditation experience with us and keeping it so easy and simple. I hope you enjoyed the perspective from a slightly less experienced meditator this week. Have you checked out my Facebook page? If you head on over to my Facebook page you’ll see a couple of things happening there at the moment: There’s a post where you can vote on some options for my new Lila B logo. There’s a link where you can vote Daring to be Happy as the best new podcast of 2017 for the Discover Pods Awards. And I’m currently planning out my first Daring to be Happy meditation challenge, and I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to see included in something like that. Do you want to know where to start, how to meditate, how to meditate for longer periods of time, do you want to be matched with an accountability buddy. Just tell me what you need help with and I’ll build a little fun Facebook challenge around it for you. So the easiest way to find my Facebook page is to use the pretty link lilab.life/facebook. Don’t you love how all my links are easy to remember like that? So my lovelies, with that I thank you for listening and hope to see you go out into the world today and show up, play big, be courageous, find peace and live happy. xx