Alan Lotvin Shares How He Practices Mindfulness and Connection

There is nothing more important than family. Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten was from my wife, who taught me to focus on what I have. Her advice, my consistent exercise routine and practicing daily mindfulness helps me thrive.

When you practice mindfulness, you can recognize sources of stress and frustration, and be more thoughtful about allowing something to bubble to the surface, or let it pass through. This is easy to practice throughout the day, even in meetings.

I also try to practice another great piece of advice my wife gave me during meetings — to  notice the relative ratio of mouth to ears in a meeting. To do this, count how many people are there, then divide that number into the length of the meeting – and that’s how long you’re allowed to speak. This helps to ensure others have the time they need to share their perspectives.  

I mentioned exercise as essential to how I thrive. I exercise regularly, and my older daughter and I are both pretty active runners. We began using one of the running social media apps to track and encourage us. To both get out and run and have technology that pushes us to just go a little bit harder and further is motivating. And because it’s public, once you articulate and publish a goal, you have the motivation to reach it. 

While these steps have helped me to thrive at work, I also think about how to help others thrive on my team. I have found transparency and authenticity go a long way. Leadership isn’t management. Leadership is about having people’s faith and trust so they understand why you are making decisions. They need to know and believe that you understand the big picture. And I think to do that, you have to give them a reason to trust you — that requires giving them enough of yourself. 

When I think about managing stress and thriving at work, I focus on having perspective. This goes back to my background as a cardiologist. Whatever just happened that’s freaking you out, 99.9996% of the time in the business world — no one died and no one is going to die. You may have an important, urgent task that impacts multiple parts of the company, but step back for a second, look around, and acknowledge that perfection isn’t necessary. People tend to overemphasize the importance of a task, usually out of fear of embarrassment or failure, but it’s okay to say “oops” or “I didn’t get to it.”

When I offer advice on career trajectories, I think about my own career. When I was in high school, the path before me was clear: get into college, go to medical school, get a residency, then a fellowship, then leave your fellowship and either go into private practice or become an academic. That was the path that was there for me and when I achieved it I was bored. Once I stepped off that path, I found the right one for me.

I used to have a quote from the Lord of the Rings that read: “not all those who wander are lost”. I got off the trail and start wandering, and it was far more interesting and rewarding, at least for me. Plus, it led me to meet and influence hundreds of thousands of interesting people, which I never would have if I had stayed on my path.