Meditation for Better Decisions in Business, Relationships & Fitness

In this episode of the Mind Body Method Podcast, I share how meditation became one of the most practical tools in my life — not just for stress, but for making better decisions in business, relationships, and fitness.

For me, meditation creates space between a situation and my reaction. Most mistakes don’t come from lack of knowledge — they come from lack of awareness. Meditation builds that awareness.

I break down how this shows up in:

• Business: More clarity, better questions, separating fear from intuition.
• Relationships: Less defensiveness, fewer assumptions, better listening.
• Fitness: More discipline, patience, and consistency.

I also share how to start — just two minutes focusing on your breath — and challenge you to try five minutes a day for one week.

Simple. Practical. Powerful.

Subscribe and let’s keep building stronger minds and better lives.

You can write to me at: Questions@MindBodyMethodPodcast.com

You can follow me at @JoshGrimm_FITNUTCOLLECTIVE

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Mind Body Method, the podcast where health and fitness go beyond the weights and the workouts. I'm your host, Josh Grimm, and every week we'll dive into what it truly means to build strength, not just in your body, but in your mind and your life. From movement with purpose to building a resilient mindset, this podcast is about empowering you to thrive in every aspect of your life, inside and outside of the gym. So let's get started. Welcome back to the Mind Body Method podcast, and I'm your host, Josh Grimm. So today I want to talk about something that has completely changed the way that you know I operate my business, my relationships, my fitness journey, and honestly, pretty much every major life decision that I make, and that is a meditation practice. Now, before some of you immediately immediately think that this episode may not be for you because you're picturing cross-legged with incense on a mountaintop somewhere, or you're trying to empty your mind for an hour, that's not the kind of meditation practice that we are going to be discussing. What we are going to do is we are going to talk about the different kinds of meditation practices and that meditation itself may look differently for you and for what your perceived notions are of it. So meditation is actually about creating enough space between a situation and your reaction so that you can choose your response instead of being controlled by your emotions. And this is helpful in every area of your life, your career, your relationships, friendships, your physical health, your mental health. And most people think that success comes from doing more, more efforts, more hustle, more grinding, more work. But what I've learned that many of the best decisions I've ever made happen when I is actually slowed down enough to actually hear myself think. I make most of my choices with an intended mind, and that has only come from the practice of learning to think clearly over the years. Today I want to explore how meditation influences the decisions, like I said, that we're making in our business, our relationships, our friendship, our fitness, and our everyday life. So hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll see meditation not as a spiritual luxury, but as more of like a practical tool for becoming more effective, more intentional, and more aligned. So let's start with this question. How many decisions do you make every single day? The average person makes absolutely thousands and thousands from something very minuscule to something grand. What to eat, what to say, how to respond, whether to work out, whether to spend money, whether to reach out to someone, whether to stay silent, right? Some of these decisions are quite small, and some of them can be life-changing, right? So the challenge isn't about making the decisions. The challenge is that most of us make decisions while perhaps emotionally overloaded. We are stressed, we distracted, we're rushing around in our day-to-day life, and we're carrying yesterday's problems into today's opportunities. Sometimes we replay old conversations while trying to be present in new ones, and there's an overlap. We're worrying about the future while completely missing what's happening right in front of us in the present. And when that happens, we're not responding from a clear mind or from clarity, and we can be reacting from past conditioning. So we're operating from habits, patterns, fears, and beliefs that were built long before the current moment, things that we have ingrained in ourselves from our past. In many ways, we're not actually seeing situations for what they are. We are seeing them through the lens of our past experience and being reactionary. Think about how many times that you've sent a text to a partner or a friend or a family member that you kind of later regretted, or maybe you made a purchase that you didn't need. You skipped a workout because you weren't feeling it that day. Or you stayed in a situation longer than you should have. Or maybe you walked away from something too soon. Maybe you've overreacted to a criticism and you misread what the intention of the other person was. Maybe you said yes when you wanted to say no. Maybe you've talked yourself out of an opportunity because fear came into play. Those aren't intelligence problems, these are awareness problems. Because if knowledge alone can create awareness and change, we'd all be living the lives that we say that we want. But most people already know that they should move more, they should eat better, you should sleep more, get better rest, manage your stress better, communicate better. And yet knowing and doing are often two very different things. And why is that? Because knowledge doesn't make the decisions, your awareness does. And meditation creates awareness. So that's where we are. Meditation allows us to observe our thoughts instead of becoming our thoughts, right? And that's a very powerful distinction. Most people live inside their minds, in thought, inside their thoughts. And meditation teaches us to kind of sit beside them and sit with them, to witness them, to question them, to realize that not every thought is true, not every thought is useful, and not every thought is worthy of our attention. One of the biggest lessons that I've learned through meditation is just that because a thought enters your mind doesn't mean that it deserves your attention, but you do have to find a place to place that thought. And just because you feel something doesn't mean that you need to act on it. Having that awareness to make those decisions and those choices to skip that text or skip that conversation. And that's where the real freedom begins. Because most people are controlled by whatever emotion is strongest in that moment. Meditation teaches us how to pause, to breathe, to observe, observe our thoughts, and observe what is going on in our mind before we react. It creates space between what we're feeling and what we're about to do. And in that space, something pretty incredible can happen, right? A choice appears. Instead of reacting, we respond. Instead of operating from fear, we operate from an intention. Instead of being driven by impulse, we can be kind of guided by the wisdom that we are learning along the way during our practice. And meditation teaches this that thoughts come and go and they do pass. Emotions come and go and they do pass. Anger will come, then it leaves. Jealousy comes and eventually it settles. Fear comes and it's subsided. Doubt comes and then it also leaves, and there's some certainty, right? But if we immediately act on every emotion that shows up, we become servants of our own mind. And temporary feelings often create and can often create permanent consequences if we allow them to. So meditation helps us to kind of sit in the discomfort of those thoughts for a moment and long enough for the clarity to emerge. And clarity does change everything. Most mistakes aren't made from a lack of knowledge. They're made from a lack of the presence, the present feeling of sitting. Okay, so let's talk business and meditation. Whether you are an entrepreneur, um, a leader, a coach, or simply someone trying to advance in your career decision making is sort of everything. Every result in your business is the outcome of a decision that you make, right? We have the decision to start, we have the decision to quit. We have the decision to hire, to invest, to take a risk, to not take a risk, to not make a choice, and the decision to stay the course when things get difficult. Success is rarely one giant breakthrough. It's not hitting the lottery, right? It's often the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of small decisions made consistently over time. So I think of myself with my business and FitNuts and the FitNut Collective, and it has evolved so much over the years, and it's because of these small decisions I've made. I actually think that a better question of like, how do I avoid making the wrong decisions, or how do I avoid failure of my business? A better question to ask yourself is what can I learn from this? Or what decisions am I making that helps grow my business? What if this doesn't work? Well, maybe instead of asking that, what about asking what becomes possible if it does? The quality of our lives and businesses is often determined by the quality of the questions we are willing to ask ourselves and the ones that we are willing to answer. And meditation improves the quality of those questions, right? How so? Well, meditation slows down the noise. And when we're constantly moving and we're constantly consuming information, distracted by notifications, emails, phones, deadlines, meetings, um, responsibilities, our team, we never allow ideas to fully develop because we're reacting all day. And we sometimes become professional responders. We super fast answer texts, we super fast answer emails, we automate our answering to texts and emails, right? We answer the demands that are put on us throughout the day, but we rarely create space, enough space to answer ourselves. And again, meditation forces us to pause. And in that pause, we will gain a little bit of perspective, hopefully, right? Perspective is one of the most valuable assets a leader can have. And when you're too close to the problem, everything feels urgent and everything feels important. So everything requires immediate response and immediate attention. I'm guilty of that myself. Um, I'm learning to be a little bit less so. But often what we need isn't more action, we need more clarity. This is the theme here. Some of my best ideas haven't happened while working. They happened after I've created space, they happened after I go on vacation, they happened after I get onto an airplane somewhere and I'm able to actually think during meditation, during walks, during moments when I wasn't trying to force an answer. The mind can be very interesting. When you stop chasing solutions, solutions will often find you. And it's almost as your subconscious finally gets room to speak once the conscious mind stops shouting at you. And I found that some of the most important business decisions I've ever made, they don't come from pressure either. They come from presence and calm and being chill. Meditation also can improve different business decisions because it helps distinguish between fear and intuition. And that distinction can be life-changing for your business. Fear brings on this sense of urgency where intuition is calm. Fear says, act right now, make this decision right now, or else something, some failure could happen. Where intuition says, let's take a step back and look at this clearly. The challenge is that most people never sit still long enough to hear it. And when we're overwhelmed, every voice in our head sounds super important because we want to get the decision done. Meditation forces us to identify the voice and control. And not every feeling is going to be one that you need to pay attention to for guidance. Sometimes fear disguises itself as logic, and sometimes comfort disguises itself as safety. And meditation helps us see those things a lot more clearly. So clarity creates confidence, and not because we suddenly know exactly what will happen, but because we're no longer allowing fear to make our decisions for us. And one of the best things that meditation has given me is the ability to become a little uncomfortable with uncertainty and be okay with it. Because uncertainty isn't a flaw in an entrepreneurial journey. It's kind of just part of the ride. If you're building something meaningful, you're constantly going to face uncertainty. And you'll launch things without guarantees. You'll invest time before seeing results. You'll make decisions, sometimes bad ones, with incomplete information. And you'll move forward before you feel like you are completely ready. And that's not a problem. That's some leadership. And meditation doesn't remove uncertainty. It helps you remain a little bit more steady in it. And it teaches you that your discomfort doesn't automatically mean that you're in danger, that you're in danger of failing, that you're in danger of your business not succeeding. The anxiety doesn't automatically mean stop. The fear doesn't automatically mean no. It helps you sit in the unknown without immediately trying to escape it. And when you're ready and when you're steady, you make better decisions. You become less reactive, um, less impulsive, less emotional. And you also stop chasing every single opportunity. You don't have to say yes to everything, especially if it doesn't align with you or your beliefs or your or your business. You stop solving problems that don't actually exist and that's that take up space and take up time. You start making decisions from a place of the intention rather than the urgency, because at the highest level of business, success is often less about doing more, and it's more and more about seeing things more clearly. Meditation is one of the most powerful tools I found for creating that clarity. And I will always carry that with me through the rest of my business development. Okay, so now let's talk about something a little bit more fun for some. Let's talk about relationships. This is where meditation may have impacted my life the most. And relationships challenge us because they expose our emotional patterns and the stories, our fears, our insecurities, our expectations, our different kinds of attachment styles. And in many ways, relationships become mirrors. You know, just like Neville Goddard says, is like everyone is us pushed out, and they reflect back the parts of ourselves we've healed and the parts we still need to work on. Without awareness, we are reactionary. Someone doesn't text us back, we create a story in our head. Someone disagrees with us, we become defensive. Someone sets a boundary, a personal boundary that they need, and we take it personally. I'm not talking about just romantic relationships, friendships as well. Someone doesn't meet an expectation if we've never communicated it, right? Right. And suddenly we're frustrated with them for a conversation that only happened inside of our own head. Meditation helps us separate facts from stories that we create, and that's a really big distinction, right? The fact might be they haven't responded to my text message. And the story then becomes they don't care about me or they're not interested in me. The fact may be that this person seems distant today, but the story becomes they're pulley away from me, but we don't know what's going on with them. The fact may be they need space, and the story then becomes, I've done something wrong. Most relationship suffering doesn't actually come from what happened. It comes from the meaning we attach to what we're experiencing. Meditation teaches us to notice the story, label the story before we believe the story, to observe the emotion before we actually become consumed by it. We can stop to ask ourselves, is this true? Or am I simply reacting from fear, insecurity, or past experience? When we develop that awareness, we stop making emotional decisions that create some sort of like unnecessary suffering. We'll stop sending texts that later regret. We stop escalating conversations that don't need to become arguments, and we stop assuming the worst where you don't have all the information about the other person's situation. We start responding from a place of curiosity and we stop being defensive. We have the ability to listen, not listening to respond, not listening to defend ourselves, not listening to prove a point, but truly listening to understand the situation at hand or understand the other person. Most people aren't looking to be fixed, they're looking to be heard. And when we quiet our own internal noise, we come to be far more capable of hearing someone else's experience because we're not going to be reactionary. We become better listeners. We are more patient, more compassionate, more present, more loving. And presence is one of the greatest gifts that you can give another human being to hold space for them. One thing I often tell people is that relationships don't improve because we find a perfect person. They improve because we become more conscious people with the experience of sharing with someone else. We hopefully become more aware of our triggers, more responsible for our emotions, and want to communicate more honestly and be more willing to pause before actually reacting. And meditation gives us the access and the ability to do these things. It allows us to respond with intention, as I keep mentioning, rather than our own ego. And often the most powerful thing you can do in a relationship is to pause, take a breath, observe, notice what's happening inside you before the actual focus of what's happening outside of you. Then you choose your response. And that being said, by the way, I'm not in a relationship currently, but I've had many successful relationships, and I can't attest that these practices do work. Meditation can save relationships, deepen connections. And because the difference between a reaction and a response is often only a few seconds of awareness. And those few seconds can change everything. Okay, so since this is the Mind Body Method podcast, obviously we have to talk some fitness, right? In its relation to meditations. So most people think that fitness is purely physical, but every workout does start in the mind, right? Every nutrition choice starts in the mind. What am I eating today? What am I working out today? Every habit starts in the mind. Meditation strengthens the same muscle that's responsible for discipline. Think about it. What is meditation? It's repeatedly bringing back your focus to the present moment. And what is discipline? It's the same thing. Repeatedly bringing yourself back to the behaviors that align with your goals at the gym, for instance. They are very similar. And meditation trains you to kind of notice distractions that can like inhibit you from getting to the gym, making healthy decisions in the kitchen. And fitness requires you to overcome these distractions if you want to achieve a certain goal. Meditation teaches patience. Fitness demands patience. Meditation develops consistency, where fitness rewards the consistency in the gym, right? The person who can sit still with the discomfort often is the same person who can push through a challenging workout because they remain committed to their nutrition, their workout, their program, their plan, and they stay focused on the long-term results. So meditation can be very, very helpful in the gym. Success in fitness isn't about intensity, it is about the consistency. And meditation can help strengthen the mind and deliver that for you. Okay, so now you're probably thinking, um, all right, Josh, you've been talking about meditation for 15, 20 minutes now, but how how do I actually start? It's quite simple. You start just by starting. You start with two minutes. That's it. Not 20, not 30. By the way, there are all different kinds of meditations. I'll go through a couple here that I like, but you sit somewhere quiet, you close your eyes, and you do focus on your breath. It's very, very important. When your mind wanders, and it will, you just gently bring it back to the breath, and that's the practice, right? The goal isn't to stop thinking, right? The goal is to notice when you've stopped paying attention. Every time you return to your breath, you're building awareness. And over time, two minutes becomes five, five minutes becomes ten, ten minutes becomes fifteen. And the benefits just compound over time. Not because you're escaping life, but because you're becoming more present for it, right? Box breathing meditations, fire breathing meditations, guided meditations. There are so many different things that you can do. And you'll learn how to incorporate different kinds depending on the situation of the needs that you have that day. Meditation won't necessarily change your circumstance of wherever you are in overnight. It won't magically solve your problems, it won't eliminate stress, will do, it will change your relationship with all those things. And when your relationship changes, your decisions change. When your decisions change, your actions change. And when your actions change, then your life can change. The quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your decisions. And the quality of your decisions is often determined by the quality of your awareness. And meditation creates that awareness. It helps you slow down enough to hear your intuition, to recognize your behavior, recognize your patterns, and to act intentionally instead of emotionally. To lead yourself before you're trying to lead anyone else. So my challenge for you is to spend five minutes each day this week sitting quietly with yourself. No phone, no distractions, just breathing, listening to your breath, listening to the clarity of what comes up with that. Observe what comes up. And you might be surprised how much wisdom has been hiding underneath all that external noise. So give it a try. Thank you for spending time with me today. And if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone that can benefit from it. And remember, the strong body starts with a strong mind. So uh if you have any questions for me, questions at mindbody methodpodcast.com. Um find me on Instagram, Josh Grimm underscore fitnut collective. I'd love to hear from you. And as always, like, comment, subscribe wherever you watch your podcast. Thanks. Thank you for joining me today on Mind Body Method. This podcast is part of Pride House Media, hosted by me, Josh Grimm, produced and edited by Josh Rosensmike, original music composed by Mel Balavin. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, leave us a rating and review. It really helps others to discover the show. I'd love to stay connected with you, so join the conversation by following me at Josh Grimm underscore fit that on Instagram and by emailing me at questions at mindbodypodcast.com.