Worrying about what’s next? Take a minute and focus on the present

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A conversation with leadership and workplace mental health expert Morra Aarons-Mele explores why focusing on the present can improve performance, reduce stress, and strengthen decision-making. Aarons-Mele is the keynote speaker June 15 at the AICPA Not-for-Profit Industry Conference in National Harbor, Md.

Aarons-Mele, also an author and podcaster, explains how leaders in high-pressure roles can balance necessary forward planning with short, purposeful pauses, which can improve clarity and team dynamics.

The discussion examines how organizations can apply mindfulness practices to build resilience and maintain focus in fast-moving environments.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why Aarons-Mele emphasizes a focus on the present.
• The practice that she says has been “the single most healing, restorative, renewing thing I’ve done.”
• Why the strategy of “take a minute and pause” can be effective during periods of disruption.
• What research says about the benefits of such pauses.
• Why Aarons-Mele warned against letting anxiety about the future drive decision-making.
• The effect that having “too many tabs open” can have on focus and performance at work.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Morra Aarons-Mele is the keynote speaker at the AICPA Not-for-Profit Industry Conference in mid-June, and she’s joining me on this episode of the Journal of Accountancy podcast. Our discussion is coming up right after this brief sponsor message.

[sponsor message]

Welcome back to the podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m glad we could have award-winning author, speaker, and podcaster Morra Aarons-Mele on the show to discuss her upcoming keynote. I mentioned that in the intro. Morra, welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Morra Aarons-Mele: Hey, Neil, how are you?

Amato: I’m doing great. Thank you for asking. We’re excited about this conversation today.

I’m going to ask a very blunt question to start. Why to you is focusing on the present so important?

Aarons-Mele: That’s actually a short question, but a complicated question. And yet, I feel like it’s a question that is so relevant for right now. We spend a lot of time, especially those of us who are in leadership positions, who have responsibilities for other people, whether at work or at home, are high-achieving, and used to working hard and planning ahead. We spend a lot of time in the future, and we spend a lot of time in the past, I think just because of our human nature and the nature of memory and learning and regret and all those things.

But when we are in the past or we are in the future, we are not present, and we might be distracted. We might be feeling complex emotions like anxiety about the future, even while we’re sitting across from someone trying to have a meeting. We’re not giving it our all and giving it our best, and we’re running down our battery. It is so profound and simple and powerful to just take a minute and come in to the present moment and focus on exactly what’s at hand.

Amato: This also may be a complicated question, but has this realization come from any observations or personal experience of yours that have led you to emphasize being in the moment as opposed to more of a future focus?

Aarons-Mele: I think this is an ancient observation going all the way back, and I think that every major world religion has a practice of coming into the present moment. Whether that is prayer, whether it’s meditation, I think that we as humans are always trying to become more focused and more present because it’s often when we feel our best. It’s an ancient question. Of course, there’s a robust body of science around mindfulness, and that’s what we’re really talking about here, being mindful in the moment.

This isn’t my observation. This is an observation that has been powerful for centuries, but it really changed my life because I’m someone who tends to run pretty anxious. When you’re anxious, your mind is usually in the future. You’re worrying, you’re planning, you’re asking, “What if?” You’re focused on the future, and sometimes you’re focused on the past. Especially, let’s take a work example. Did I sound stupid in the meeting? Is the client not going to trust me anymore because I made a mistake? Should I have majored in something different in school?

Anxiety takes us out of the present moment at great cost sometimes. We feel exhausted, we feel distracted. We’re jumpy in our bodies. It’s an unpleasant experience, and anxiety isn’t always a bad experience. Sometimes it’s really good. But for me the practice of being mindful and getting my brain out of the what ifs and into the now has been the single most healing, restorative, renewing thing I’ve done in my life.

Amato: For people listening to this podcast or people who are going to hear you at the not-for-profit conference, they may come away with it and it’s like, I’m going to buy into these things. I’m going to emphasize these concepts in a week or two, sure, it works better. But how can they have the more long-lasting emphasis to make some of these things you’re talking about more part of their routine?

Aarons-Mele: This is such a good question because we all know what we should do, and if we did it, we’d all be perfect.

Amato: You mentioned it on a podcast episode. We all know we should get more sleep, for example.

Aarons-Mele: Right. We all know we should exercise. We all know that we should stop worrying, and when the rubber meets the road, it’s hard. And this is what’s really relevant for your audience. We are rewarded often for these behaviors at work. In the accounting profession, I would assume — I’m not an accountant — that a lot of your responsibility is to plan for the what ifs. You’re the one who’s going to be accountable if the numbers are off or the tax bill is higher or the budget didn’t pan out or rules weren’t followed, and so you are rewarded and often expected to be in the what ifs.

One of my favorite recent studies is a study out of Temple University in Philadelphia that encouraged leaders to take time away in times of organizational disruption, from planning for the future and scenario planning, and just focus on the next half-hour, becoming mindful and saying, we’re just going to focus on this business at hand, this one piece of business.

What the research found is that not only did performance on those teams improve, morale improved in times of disruption as well. I’m not saying to change your entire way of working, you still need to be that person who’s scenario planning. But the ability to just take a minute and pause is all you have to do. I’m not asking you to go meditate for five days straight or even meditate for an hour. I’m asking you to learn how to pause, take a minute to check in with your body and your mind, and go on.

Amato: That can work in a team dynamic, too, if a group is in a meeting and I don’t know, I’m making up this scenario as I go. But just to say, let’s step back, let’s take a break. Maybe let’s talk about something else for 10 minutes. What did you do last weekend? I think that can diffuse the tension and then get you back when you do need to get back on the, OK, let’s deal with this problem that’s going to happen in the future. I think it helps.

Aarons-Mele: Of course it helps, and actually that’s mindful because what you’re asking people to do is engage in a conversation right in front of them and tune into the conversation and have fun with it. You can tune in, pause, reset in conversation. You can do it with your body. You can do it with music. You can do it with movement. You can do it with breath, and you can do it with meditation. You can do it with eating. You can take a pause in a meeting and feel the apple that you’re holding and take a bite of that apple or that cookie or whatever is in your meeting and use that pause to reset. It is so powerful.

Amato: I think that’s a really good personal lesson and maybe a small team dynamic lesson. What about an organizational lesson? Organizations have to look ahead. They’re always going to do some planning. How can organizations emphasize being present at work and maybe it helping their businesses in the future?

Aarons-Mele: Well, there’s a big difference between intentional forward looking and running a piece of your brain on distraction and anxiety looking ahead. I think that’s the difference that I really want to highlight. What I hear from leaders is that they feel unfocused, distracted, pulled in a million different directions, like they live life with too many tabs open.

Amato: Guilty.

Aarons-Mele: Guilty. That’s not good for us, and it’s not good for our organizations. What the pause does and the moment of mindfulness does is it just asks us to take a second away from all of that swirl and reset. Then we can say, I’m going to think about the future. I think the key here is the agency, the choice. I often say to people, we live in really chaotic times. Things are really hard right now. I have no control over, frankly, whether AI is going to take my job. I really can’t control that. But I can get out of that anxiety, which I have no control over, calm my body, and then set an intention for what I can do. We all want the ability to feel less scattered, more focused, and like we have more agency over our lives.

Amato: Just the number of ways that we can connect with people, communicate with them on a daily basis at work, I think is a demonstration of that. It’s like, oh, you missed my chat, but maybe you’ll see my text.

Aarons-Mele: Oh my God.

Amato: Or, we should have a meeting about this. There’s so many different ways.

Aarons-Mele: Our nervous system gets overwhelmed when there’s too much incoming. I think the feeling that a lot of us feel, we feel digital overwhelm, we feel time overwhelm, we feel task overwhelm, we feel role overwhelm, like, wait, I have to be a parent, I have to be a partner, and I have to be a person at work. Our nervous systems can’t handle all that incoming. It’s kind of like a short circuit. The nervous system is a bit, I gotta stop here, and the ability to pause and choose which text you’re going to read or what role you’re going to be for the next hour, who you’re actually going to choose to talk to for the next hour is actually a physiological way to help prevent that overwhelm.

Amato: We’ve talked a lot about being in the present versus the future, but I will go back. You mentioned the past. Is there value on focusing on the past? I like to think about it like, “Oh, 20 years ago this week, I was doing this.” I don’t know. Maybe it’s not helpful, but sometimes it reminds me about progress made, but I don’t know what you think about that.

Aarons-Mele: I think it’s hugely helpful. Of course, there’s the famous quote: He who is ignorant of the past is doomed to repeat it, or he ignores history is doomed. Anyway, you know what I’m saying. We have to look at our past. But the difference is that we take a minute to choose to look at the past versus, I’m sure you’ve all felt this, the rumination and the negative feelings that might come to us about the past without our control. There’s actually benefit in looking at the things you screwed up in the past. Teams benefit from it, we benefit from it. Regret is not a negative thing. But when it’s just running rent free in your head, that is when it’s harmful. Does that make sense?

Amato: It does, yeah. I actually had a friend, a former coworker, post on LinkedIn about probably, I don’t know if it was “his greatest,” but it was a colossal professional failure. He posted about how bad it was and the making it better, how it got done. But I think it was that focus on the past like, hey, this is what I learned from this situation and you can learn, too.

Aarons-Mele: Well, we have to feel uncomfortable. I think that’s another thing that we learn when we pause is that you’re going to feel feelings. You may be triggered by a failure just by reading a newspaper article or seeing someone’s name on LinkedIn. This happens to me sometimes, and an uncomfortable memory may pop up. It’s OK to feel that. Part of what you have to do to reconcile and understand and grow from your past is to sit with that discomfort. But that’s different than just being a loop on repeat in your head that almost becomes a habit.

Amato: Morra, this has been a fun conversation. I’ve enjoyed it. I can’t wait to have our members see you in person at the Not-for-Profit Conference in June. We’ll have a link in the show notes for the conference registration. Is there anything you’d like to add in closing?

Aarons-Mele: Well, this is great, and I can’t wait to come to the conference. I would just ask listeners, take a minute every day to notice. Maybe notice your shoulders, your neck, your jaw in the middle of the day. Are they tight? Is something hurting? Maybe notice how you feel before certain meetings. Maybe notice when you’re in the what ifs. The first step to really being able to become mindful and have more agency over these emotions and your time and your attention is to notice. That’s my homework for everyone.

Amato: That’s a great assignment, fairly easy assignment, I think, so we should all get A’s on that. Morra Aarons-Mele, thank you very much for being on the show.

Aarons-Mele: Thanks, Neil.