It is seven in the morning. You have not reached the office yet, and in your head you have already sat through three meetings, answered a difficult email and rehearsed a conversation you are dreading. So what if the most productive nine minutes of your day were the ones where you did nothing at all?
It sounds too simple to be true. And yet in 2011, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School, found that eight weeks of mindfulness practice physically changed the brain. People grew in the areas linked to learning, memory and self-awareness, and as their stress came down, the brain’s alarm centre, the part that fires up under pressure, actually became smaller.
Eight weeks of sitting still, and the brain itself had started to change.
I did not know any of this when I first sat down to meditate. I only knew I was in pain.
In the last quarter of 2021, I developed arthritis in my hip. At first it was mostly physical pain, and it was there all the time, even when I tried to sleep. But it arrived at a time when my mind was already heavy. I was setting up my coaching practice and it was a frustrating phase… money was only going out, nothing was coming in from coaching, and I kept wondering whether I could succeed at being an entrepreneur.
One of the coaches I knew then suggested that stress can make pain feel heavier, and that meditation might help. I did not fully understand it, but I had nothing to lose, so I started experimenting. A few minutes here and there, never quite sure if I was doing it right.
The next year I got a job and hired a mentor for myself, Dr. Saloni Singh. She sent me her nine minute guided meditation, and that is where my real practice began. Nine minutes, every day. And slowly something started to settle. I became calmer, I began to see the bigger picture, and I started arriving at work calmer and earlier.
I remember one morning in particular. It was the usual office rush, emails coming in, people needing things, the kind of morning that once would have had me panicking before I even sat down. And that day I simply did not react. I looked at what was in front of me, chose what mattered first, and worked through it calmly, one step at a time. Nobody around me would have noticed anything different, but I did. For the first time, the rush was outside me and not inside me.
Quick Read – What Shaped Me: Coaching, and the Season the House Went Quiet
Then in 2023 I read Living Untethered by Michael Singer and Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. Both books gave words to what I had started feeling in those nine minutes. I had been living in my head, disconnected from my body and from the present moment, and believing every anxious thought as if it were the truth. Reading them, I realised I am not my thoughts. I can watch them come and go, the way you watch traffic from a window, without having to jump into every car.
That is what freeing myself from my own thoughts means to me. I still cannot empty my mind, and I do not think I need to. My thoughts just do not run me the way they used to.
And that practice carried me further than I ever expected. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025, it was already there for me. It gave me hope when the facts were frightening, and it helped me stay positive one day, and sometimes one hour, at a time.
What this means for leaders
I see the same pattern in so many senior leaders I coach. They carry everything in their heads. They read a tense email at seven in the morning and carry it into every meeting, they rehearse difficult conversations in the car, and they lie awake at midnight turning a decision over and over. And very often their body has been telling them for months, with tight shoulders and headaches they keep ignoring.
Most of them do not need another strategy. They need a few minutes of stillness where they stop believing every urgent thought and come back to the present, because that is where clear decisions are actually made. I really believe calm under pressure is something we can practise, and it can start with something as small as nine minutes.
So if you want to start, try this tomorrow morning. Before you open your phone, sit for a few minutes, close your eyes and notice your breath and your body. When a thought pulls you away, just notice it and come back. That is the whole practice. There is no right or wrong way to do it, you are just giving yourself a few minutes to come back to yourself.
Some days, the best thing a leader can do is simply stop and sit still for a few minutes.
If your mind has been running faster than you can keep up with… reach out. We can talk about it, with no pressure at all.
With love,
Usha Nagrani
Usha Nagrani is a Doha-based executive leadership and career coach helping senior leaders and expats grow with clarity, confidence and influence. Reach out to her to discuss your leadership goals or challenges at usha@ushanagrani.com
