Psychotherapy or Meditation – which is better?

At Karma coaching we promote a blend of reflective meditation and active psychological techniques to reduce stress, become better at communication and ultimately find more success and happiness.  But one may ask, why the blend?

The truth is that they both influence the other. Learning to be relaxed and content can empower our ability to think and act like we want to. But how is this so?

Have you ever tried to break out of a negative emotion and whilst you put on a brave face, you just can’t do it? Do you try to be positive when all around you your life is falling apart? We can pretend to be positive on the surface, but at the unconscious level there is nothing we can do to prevent those feelings of anxiety or frustration from bubbling away.

Other people pick up on this. You may put on a smile while you are talking to someone in business, say, but at an unconscious level they will be picking up that something is not right and will feel a sense of trepidation in dealing with you.

If you are totally at peace, however, this will form a great base on which to promote yourself, your business or your ideas. Of course, you could become peaceful through meditation but still be disorganised, lazy, rude or unskilful at communicating. Hence, we also need the skills of positive psychology to be a total success. So whether you are in business, trying to impress someone new, or just being social at a party, it is good to be at peace on the inside and have the skills of a good communicator on the outside.

For this reason, you need to be disciplined in both creating inner calm (through meditation) and also adopting the positive mind set of success (learned through psychological techniques like NLP).

Meditation helps in two other ways. By developing concentration and mindfulness, these two skills are like super-charges for the mind. They help you to think faster, more deeply and more creatively than ever before. This helps you to learn and retain the skills that you are currently developing in your life, whether it be at work or in some other area. So, any techniques that you learn from psychology, coaching or other business training will be far more powerful in a mind that is sharp and clear.