The greatest asset you have as a business person is your mindset while your most expensive commodity is time. Seven minutes meditation gives you the best of both worlds. With a little practice in a little time, you come up with problem-solving ideas with amazing ease. Your friends will think that you're a genius. And you will really feel good about yourself and your accomplishments. This is because meditation puts you in the alpha state of mind that enhance creativity, blasts tension, and indecision. You know what to do on every occasion because you’ve learned to think on autopilot.

What is meditation? Meditation is a process of mental exercise that primes the brain and centers the heart to cultivate productive ideas. This encourages whole brain thinking that put you in the zone of peak performance. You must be in the know to be in the flow. Therefore knowledge of how the brain works is crucial.

How does it work? It works when you work it into your consciousness. There are different segments of the brain which tend to work independently of one another. Each part may even antagonise another. The four cardinal parts of the brain are the left (intellectual) brain, the right (intuitive brain), the mid-brain (emotions) and the hind-brain (reticular activating system). When all the parts of the brain work together, you are focused and obstacles are eliminated. If not, disarray, failure, and tension are the norm for 95% of the population. Meditation fixes these problems by helping you develop complex and more efficient neuronal connections that encourages whole brain thinking—the way most geniuses and top achievers think. Joshua 1:8 says that with meditation, you shall be able to deal wisely with the affairs of this life. That sounds like genius to me!

Seven minute per session meditation shortens the process. Mental energy loss due to scattered thinking is minimized because your mind is forced to focus on the results instead of rehearsing the problems. This is a powerful too for personal direction, goal-orientation and personal power. You’ll be calm in the midst of turmoil. All this is achieved by concurrent use of seven components of meditation.

1. Personalization: You must use personal pronouns in your affirmation when you repeat or recite your mantra. Don’t use meaningless word from a guru or what you copied somewhere. Come up with your own tailor-made phrases based on specifics that you’re programming for yourself. When you personalize words, you own them and emotions are involved which create attachments. This is how you call up the help of the energy currency of your human spirit. This helps achieve your goal sooner than later.

2. Localization: Don’t think of all your problems or challenges at the same time. Narrow your meditation session to one problem at a time. This is how you channel your energy to burn the problem just like a concentrated sun ray sets a piece of green paper ablaze. Yes, concentration is the heart of contemplation as you become a power house of creative ideas.

3. Memorization: To save time, you must keep the solution to our problem or goal you’re programming for your self at the back burner of your mind. For recall in subsequent session, you must repeat your mantra to yourself for it to stick in your deeper mind. Some people write it down and look at it. Writing down you 'focus phrase' alone increases retention by three hundred-fold while highlighting with yellow and sky blue increases retention by three-fold. Highlighting with red calls for urgent action. The more senses you engage, the better your retention and recall. The greatest programming is what you tell yourself. It is powerful in shaping your self-image. It is called auto-suggestion. Note that all improvements in your life starts with improvements in your self-image. We don't see the world the way it is; we see the world the way we are. Based on your self-image, you shape your world with your words.

4. Verbalization: This is called learning by mouth. Positive confession is the most powerful way of getting the word deep down in your human spirit where the will and gut to make things happen reside. Know that it is your words that shape your mind, and not the other way round. Repetition is the key. The discipline of repetitive verbalization of your goals is the mother of all achievements. Don’t be tempted to stop by looking at circumstances. The words you speak also create pictures.

5. Visualization: Image is everything! You must visualize to actualize. The fact is that the soul cannot think without pictures. Visualization rests on the premise that everything is created twice (in heart and mind) before it manifests in the physical world. A picture is truly more than a thousand words. It also takes descriptive words to create pictures. This art of making mental movies is like photography. Good photographers are always focusing only on the pictures they want to develop. This time, we prefer movies (motion pictures) to posters (stagnant) pictures. Get a picture of the replica or representation of your dream—what you want to be, do or have. Rehearse it again and again in your mind with gusto. Put emotion to it as if it has already been achieved. When the picture takes, the results show up sooner than later with consistent practice.

6. Actualization: This is the doing part. Doing is the most powerful part of programming. “What I hear, I may forget. What I see, I may not remember; but what I do is part of me,” says a Chinese Proverb. No amount of mental rehearsal or confession can get the job done. Your thinking creates your reality; your action brings it to you. No blueprint has ever carried out itself and no war strategy has ever fought a battle. People do! The whole essence of steps 1 to 5 is to bring you to 6. Meditation is a process. The seven minutes forces the brain to think in a time frame by giving it deadline. This triggers the reticular activating system to provoke the subconscious mind to come with a solution. Subconscious mind is the center of the law of attraction in the brain. The thrill is in the doing. “It is the law of nature that those who do has the power and those who don’t have not the power.” Said Ralph Waldo Emerson.

7. Manifestation: This is the result of implementing steps 1 to 6. This is the outward evidence of success that everybody sees. Most untrained folks don’t understand the law of process. They tend to attribute success to luck. LUCK is laboring under correct knowledge of all the steps.

How to Meditate: Putting the Pieces Together. Understanding the Seven P’S:

• Purpose: you must keep the reason why of your meditation before you.
• Prospects: Rehearse the benefits at the back of your mind. Your intention will keep your attention. Otherwise your mind will get bored and that will erode your confidence and believe in the system. Purpose and prospects are related.
• Place: You must establish a specific place for meditation. The free wheeling life style of anything goes will not cut it. Otherwise you lose focus. Some people use a corner of their room or office to do.
• Period. You must establish a specific time to stand and end. Some people prefer early in the morning immediately after waking up from sleep. Whatever you do, don’t meditate while driving, operating a machinery, after eating or when you’re tired. Don’t meditate on the bed or bedroom. The mind has learned to associate those with sleep. You’re time window is a maximum of seven minutes.
• Preliminaries: These are preambles to get you ready. Remove belts, ties, shoes, and jewelries.
• Position: The best position is lotus or the Buddha position. It helps strengthen your body frame, improves your posture and makes you a little uncomfortable so that you can’t fall back to sleep. Never lie down. It is associated with sleep. Alternative positions include sitting on a chair and relaxing all your muscle groups. This works best at office hours.
• Practice: This is where all the techniques come together. Here you close your eyes to avoid distraction and encourage focus, relax your muscles and recite your mantra from memory using personal pronouns. You also visualize your end-goal as if it has already happened bringing gusto to the whole exercise. You should be done in less than seven minutes.

A closing thought:

Meditation is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your business. If thinking is everything, then it is the most important thing. You can describe your life or design your future in the present by meditation. Every great person that has ever lived was a great thinker. Jeffrey Bezos used it to found Amazon.com; Pierre Omardiya did the same with eBay. Bill Gates takes a whole week off just to meditate. Bill calls it 'think week.' ‘Think and Grow Rich’ is all about the use of your mind power to create wealth.

So don’t wait for flashes of inspiration to hit you like a thunder bolt, prime your goldmine and you will always produce gold. Creative juice will flow effortlessly and automatically with practice and priming your brain. You become a living magnet that attracts money, health, happiness, influence, protection and relationship because you are aligned with the energy of the universe where every good thing originates. The laws of the universe are the laws of success. It is in our heart and mind that God teaches us the secret to unlock the vault of the universe. It’s all within you waiting to be harnessed. “That’s GREAT (God Rewards Every Active Thinker),” says my friend, Ed Gray. Meditation is what makes the great, great and separates them from the rest.