In Chapter 12 of 14, Wharton MBA graduate and "Suits: A Woman on Wall Street" author Nina Godiwalla highlights how MBA students can benefit from meditation. Godiwalla notes how external factors, including family and job, motivate our career ambitions. She shares how external factors, including television, movies, and sports, also relieve us of stress from our external ambitions. By teaching meditation, Godiwalla has found the internal awareness to be especially comforting to MBA students who are in high peer pressure environments where unnecessary urgency is often associated with decison making. The internal focus alleviates stress and provides a calming awareness and clarity to longer term focused decisions.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: Why should an MBA student consider meditation?
Nina Godiwalla: I think there’s just this universal feature within us that we have a way within ourselves to ground ourselves. I think often we look to external sources to find happiness, our spouse, children, our family, jobs, careers what ever it is, we look, that’s what we look through too often and then we find things that constantly distract us when we’re not – when those things aren’t working for us, TV, movies just, you know, what ever it is we find our own little distractions and instead of doing that there’s something inside that you can actually change the way you feel, the way you think and even understand, it’s just that initial awareness of what it is. So for me for MBA students there were people there who were very grounded and knew exactly what they wanted to do and I don’t know if they necessarily, if they probably had a way that they were doing that themselves, I think MBA students should consider it because it gives them a sense to feel comfortable with what they’re doing and step back and maybe operate in a way that in the long term is really going to pay them off and not necessarily just right now this looks like the right thing to be doing because everyone else is doing it.