Texting Your Way to Mindfulness: Introducing MindfulText with Founder Mark Montalban

:: 01:01

Okay. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Mindful Coach podcast. I'm your host Brettt Hill, founder of The Mindful Coach Association and a The Mindful Coach Association Coach trainer. I'm really, really excited to be talking in this episode with a friend and colleague, Mark Montalban. Wait till you meet Mark. He's a fascinating character and you're going to love what he's got to say. Mark is a pioneer in applied mindfulness and founded The Mindful Coach Association. The Mindful Coach Association? A mindfulness based text messaging learning platform. His passion for mindfulness developed through challenging life events that fuel his work. He's known as a top rated startup mentor for his startup experience in over 40 industries and has advised hundreds of early stage founders globally. I can testify to Mark's expertise in this area of startups and his wisdom in that area. He knows so much about it. He's fascinating to talk to. Welcome to the show, Mark.

:: 02:12

Hey, Brett, nice to be here. Thanks for that great intro and yeah, excited to talk about mindfulness and chat once again.

:: 02:19

Yeah, it's great. Mark and I always have a good time talking and just to put a little context of this conversation, almost was it two years ago now? I forget. Wow. Yeah, it's been about two years since we did a conference called The Future is Mindful. And Mark and I were in a mindfulness training program together and we just had a nice kind of easy collaboration. And it was really nice just chatting. And then we had this notion that there might be a need to have a way for people to be able to talk about mindfulness in a business context. Like, how do I get into that? How do I become more mindful in business? And we did this crazy experiment. We just said, okay, we'll do it. And he came up with this brilliant idea, brilliant name called The Future is Mindful. And lo and behold, soon enough we had a website and we started inviting these people and wow, were we surprised when most of these characters we invited all said yes. And we had a really fabulous conference. That was a lot of fun to do, Mark.

:: 03:29

Yeah, that was awesome. And it was very timely. We had a lot of great folks chime in on the conversation. The topic of mindfulness for the workplace is still growing and evolving. And so I'm sure it was great learning. I know it was great learning for folks.

:: 03:48

Yeah, we had a great turnout and we had some really a name speakers. I think the website is still up there, the futureisminful.com, if you want to go check it out. But I know that you were at the time and also you've been invested in working with The Mindful Coach Association and also startups all over the world in terms of getting things started. And so I wanted to talk to you today about a little bit about how it was that you decided that The Mindful Coach Association was what you wanted to invest in, and then we can talk from there to the broader picture of mindfulness and business.

:: 04:26

Yeah, thanks for that question. Yeah, I've had a very interesting experience in my career. I worked for this company, this institution called the Founder Institute, and I basically worked at it. Well, actually, my first job out of college was for an AI company called Hexagon. And basically what I would do this was like back in 2012, 2013, as sentiments were coming in from social media, I would categorize them into positive, negative, or neutral. And basically I was training an algorithm to recognize sentiments called a hand coder at the time. And so that was my first role. And that was a very interesting you know, I grew up in the bay Area, in the San Francisco Bay area, in Castro Valley, in the East Bay, and the exposure to technology, it's part.

:: 05:31

Of our you're in the heart of it. All, right?

:: 05:33

So, yeah, I've been very interested in tech, and so when I found the opportunity at Founder Institute to take part in a startup accelerator, I was like, sign me up. And at the time when I first started, they were already global. They were in about 40 cities globally, but their model was very unique in that it went viral, so to speak. I helped them scale to 200 cities globally, and actually they were running at the peak right before the pandemic, about 2000 events per year. And through that, you can imagine how.

:: 06:09

Many thousand 2000 in person events per year. Holy. I can't even get my head around that.

:: 06:19

Yeah, you can imagine the conversations and the energy and the amount of people coming to this place called the Founder Institute to share their ideas. They targeted folks that were in their day jobs, and there are a lot of people that have ideas, and so how many of them actually take action on those ideas? The Founder Institute was there to help early stage people with these nascent ideas really start to take action and understand how to take action. And so what does Marketing look like from zero, from nothing, from an idea? What does the legal look like? Should you start a legal thing? Should you start fundraising right away? And so there was a structured process. The program was actually pretty intense. It was a 40 hours a week program for people that had existing jobs.

:: 07:20

That's a big ask.

:: 07:22

Yeah. So you can imagine most people didn't survive, but the ones that did, they were really inspiring to work with because they had a bias for action and were just getting after it.

:: 07:35

So kind of a boot camp mentality in a way, right?

:: 07:38

It was definitely a boot camp. People have called it a gauntlet.

:: 07:42

I've seen people cry, of course.

:: 07:46

I've seen people go through a divorce from going through this program. If you're launching your own business and really investing in your passion, you really got to have a stable foundation. And that's kind of where, among other influences, that's where I found the importance of having a very strong mental foundation. When you really just put yourself out there, it's important to really understand yourself and the reasons why you're doing things. I met so many entrepreneurs that a year or two down the line, they're questioning, why am I doing this? I have no idea. Am I just chasing the money? Am I trying to get women by being a CEO? So there's so many different reasons why people do this and what I wanted to help do. And what happened at Founder Institute? Actually about three quarters, or about the end time, when I left the Founder Institute, they created a mandatory application question where you had to answer, what positive do you plan to do with your business? So there was a questionnaire on making it mandatory to think about the positive impact of your business. And so just getting into more of the reason why I started The Mindful Coach Association is partly that. So I worked at Founder Institute from 2013 to about 2020, right before the pandemic. And during that time, my father became very ill, and he was struck with three different autoimmune diseases.

:: 09:39

Oh, man.

:: 09:39

And during this time, I was learning a lot about mindfulness and the positive impact on well being. And I wish I knew a lot more about it as my dad was getting sick. But as he was passing, I started to teach him these ideas of really managing his mental health. And I inherited from him these poor emotional strategies, I'll call it. And so I knew that there was some sort of impact there, and that kind of just really dug into me, that there's something here to explore. And so I started to research deeply the idea between the mind body connection and as we know now, our mental health deeply impacts our overall well being. And so when my dad passed away in 2016, my mom was actually diagnosed with cancer at the same time. So I was struck with maybe potentially losing a second parent. And so at this time in 2016, I was still working at the Founder Institute, being around a lot of great energy from that perspective, but my family life was struggling in that way. And I just thought, how do I really support my mom as she's going through this diagnosis? And this is where The Mindful Coach Association really began. I started to text my mom on a daily basis to check in and I would just share mindfulness practices. I would share breathing exercises, I would check in. And we come from a family that's kind of stubborn. We don't like to listen to external things. So the fact that she was opening up to these, she was also very religious and well, still is and wasn't super open to the idea of mindfulness. But there are different ways to share it, are mindfulness based. And so I started to share all these mindfulness based practices and she loved it. She took it on well and she started practicing. She shares practices with me now.

:: 12:01

Oh, nice reverse The Mindful Coach Association.

:: 12:06

Long story short, I texted her and helped her really invest in her mental well being through text message and that she credits me for helping her get through that. And she's on the other side of her diagnosis. She's healthy now, beautiful mission. There's no sign of it. And I really think that it's because of this mental clarity and this positivity that started to come about just by practicing mindfulness. Right. Because a lot of people think negative thoughts all the time. I remember starting to learn mindfulness in 2011 and most of my thoughts were negative. I noticed that and I was like, oh my God. That was one of the big switches in my head when you first became.

:: 12:52

Aware that there's kind of a lot of unpleasantness going on in here. Yeah.

:: 12:56

And so I was like, how many of our peers and people and friends think this way? This The Mindful Coach Association is a passion project for me to bring awareness to that and really help bring this practice of mindfulness to address that. And what I found best is to communicate that through text message. And we're seeing now that there are interesting things. I can't go into too much detail about this because we're going to make some announcements pretty soon. But yeah, that's a bit of how I got into this space and where we're at now.

:: 13:38

Wow, that's quite a story in such a I use the term organic way of coming around here's. A need from something that really matters and really made a profound difference. And just within you the wish to spread this goodness at scale. So it sounds to me like the Mark that knows how to scale intersects this Mark that realizes this big need and you just naturally begin to architect something to put that together.

:: 14:08

Well, I'll mention one thing on that. One of the biggest learnings I learned at Founder Institute, seeing literally thousands of startups and entrepreneurs fail and many succeed is that the biggest reason why entrepreneurs fail is because they give up. And one big reason why they give up is because they don't have a strong. So, you know, going through this process, I always knew that I wanted to work for myself and work on a startup and launch something myself. I knew learning through my experience at the Founder Institute. That what is going to push me to be working on this for more than three years. More than five years, more than ten years, hopefully, is having a really strong why. And so I associated that I found my why with my family and this global need for mindfulness in the world. And I know that you yourself also feel that passion to bring mindfulness into the world. And it's great to work with you.

:: 15:16

Thank you.

:: 15:18

Yeah, that's part of the reason why I am launching in this space. I've developed a strong why, and I'm going to keep going.

:: 15:28

Yeah. Beautiful. I know I've enjoyed working with you and of course, using your technology in The Mindful Coach Association, which listeners may not know because I don't talk about it that much. But The Mindful Coach Association is a class that I teach for coaches and what I call coaches and helping professionals that value mindful who want to learn mindful somatic techniques. This is like the best stuff that I know. After studying with some amazing people, I put it together in this training. And part of the course includes a sequence of text messages that come every single day for eight weeks, and that's provided by The Mindful Coach Association. And so I've had really positive reviews because at the end of it, I say, how did you like the text messaging? And by and large, 90% of all the people who participated in the course, they love, they rave about receiving these text messages every day as a way to help them ground in what they're learning. So from my point of view, your mission was very well achieved in the context of this course. And I imagine that there's a purpose like that in many other ways as well. Like mine's teaching, we're helping my clients, my students in this case, become more connected to the methods and the things like this week's meditation is this. This week's practice is this. So be sure you carve out time for this particular technique today. What are the other kinds of applications for this? Like, in the business world, I know you're deeply involved with that. So how does it play out in that context? Can The Mindful Coach Association or the text messaging situation be used to help businesses teach their people how to be more mindful or adopt a more mindful approach in certain teams?

:: 17:26

The short answer is yes. And again, I can't share too much about what we're doing. We're in the process of making a few announcements. But what I will share is that there which is in alignment with mindfulness for the workplace, if this is where we can go.

:: 17:45

Yeah.

:: 17:46

I recently looked at a study that was published a couple of months ago, and this is relevant for anybody interested in keeping track of advancements in mindfulness for the workplace. And it's a study called you can look this up online. It's a study called Mindfulness Based and mindfulness informed interventions at the workplace. A systematic review and meta regression analysis of RCTs and RCTs are randomized controlled trials. It's like the gold standard for a really great scientific research study. There were seven authors and they looked at 91 mindfulness studies in the workplace that were very high quality and there were about 5000 participants. And the good news is that mindfulness yes is a positive impact for the workplace. There were some interesting things to share that I'll just review really quickly here. The types of interventions that were used. I can reference here quickly. MBSR, of course, is highly referenced mindfulness based stress reduction. For those that don't know, it's one of the most widely used forms of mindfulness based practices. It's in over about 700 hospitals in the world. So there's a lot of research behind it, but there's a growing expansion into different types of mindfulness based interventions. And going along into your point a little bit, the study saw that there wasn't a big difference in MBSR versus other types of interventions. MBSR still is the most validated and provides the most impact, but there is a growing trend and efficacy for new mindfulness based interventions. And that's kind of where The Mindful Coach Association is going now. To discover new mindfulness based interventions, specifically through text message and yoga based interventions were measured. Meditation courses were also measured as well. An interesting thing here that I thought is good to cover as well is the difference between mindfulness based interventions and mindfulness informed interventions.

:: 20:17

Okay.

:: 20:18

I've been recently learning these terminologies that is kind of more technical, but I find it interesting.

:: 20:25

Hey, let's go there. We're geeking out here.

:: 20:28

Yeah. I imagine our audience might be interested in learning about this as well, so I'll cover that.

:: 20:34

No, I'd love to. I'm all about the tech.

:: 20:37

Yeah. So mindfulness based interventions are primarily focused on learning or enhancing mindfulness, where mindfulness informed interventions incorporate mindfulness principles but also integrate other methods. For example, a breathing meditation is a mindfulness based intervention when it specifically focuses on cultivating awareness by observing your breathing patterns. But if like a Wim HOF breathing exercise is a mindfulness informed intervention, for example, because it targets specific physiological or psychological outcomes. So that's kind of the definition that they're thinking about here.

:: 21:25

Interesting.

:: 21:27

Another point from that study is that online interventions were as effective as analog interventions and so in person had similar impacts to online courses.

:: 21:41

Well, that's huge.

:: 21:42

Based on this study, which was interesting. Well, this is coming from my own analysis of this. I'm not an actual researcher, although I am going to be cited in a research study pretty soon, hopefully. But I recommend folks really dive into this yourself to get your own understanding. This is just my kind of brain dump on learning. Don't take my words as the gold standard for everything you're learning here.

:: 22:08

We'll take it as a silver standard.

:: 22:11

Just a call to there's a lot of great research going into the mindfulness space. And so one of the reasons why I want to share this is to inspire more business leaders that aren't using mindfulness for the workplace to really explore it because there's a lot of great research and evidence to show that this is a really great tool to be teaching your people.

:: 22:34

Indeed. And so the benefits of two businesses are mini and manifold. There's a little bit of a criticism around that, like in terms of businesses that just like, oh, we need a mindfulness program so we can buff up our employees to deal with the tough circumstances that we have. What do you have to say to people who are more critical of mindfulness adventure or mindfulness initiatives from corporations considering that particular critique?

:: 23:09

Well, I empathize with them because they're getting bombarded with so many different options and it's hard to know what type of mindfulness is going to be good for people. It's a valid concern and point. I think one thing that I know that a lot of great HR folks and people in business are doing is testing out new things. And so my thought to that is don't knock it till you try it and if it works, then win win scenario there.

:: 23:49

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. I would say it's a win win, like you say. In the sense that I feel like if, let's say, a corporation has this very toxic environment and they decide to implement mindfulness training for their employees, and the intent is to help employees be, quote unquote, more resilient so that they can deal with this toxic world more effectively. But one of the side effects I think comes out of this is that people wake up to the fact that the impact of this toxicity is really like you said earlier, it's physical. It has a significant consequence on your capacity to have a happy life, be healthy, be happy, engage in a fulfilling, satisfactory life experience. And if your workplace is a really negative contributor to that, becoming more mindful makes that more of a somatic truth that you realize as opposed to just something you power through. And so in some ways they can get the opposite of resilience. They get a willingness to enforce a boundary around that and saying, I'm sorry, but this has got to change or I can't be here. And so I think maybe that was somewhat of what happened with COVID and the great resignation, is that people had a chance to take a step back because of this. Not because people were forced to be more mindful, but they had the opportunity to experience a different way of relating to work that wasn't like in the pressure cooker. And it's kind of like, you know, this is so much better that I just won't take the alternative. So in a certain way the mindfulness training could be, if they don't intend for it to be actually beneficial to employees can kind of wind up turning up the heat within the staff to become a more human centric organization.

:: 26:01

Yeah, it's an interesting and very nuanced topic in my opinion. I think mindfulness is personally, I think mindfulness is very much a long term investment, and I can certainly see how bringing mindfulness to a very toxic organization can very much create chaos. Of course.

:: 26:25

Yeah.

:: 26:27

But you can just logically think through that. If a toxic organization continues, what does toxicity do to an organization? It's just going to slowly kill the organization over time. So even if you do work in a toxic organization or have some level of toxicity, I definitely think that mindfulness should be considered as a tool to explore.

:: 26:57

Yeah, absolutely. Are there any other trends in mindfulness and wellness as a whole that you wanted to talk about that you've been keeping your eye on?

:: 27:09

Yeah, I love talking about trends. I come from the startup accelerator space and so it's ingrained into me to keep up with these kinds of things. One thing that I noticed is I've seen like, maybe a dozen sleep related businesses pop up and calm and headspace both have their own sleep functionalities, and there seems to be a lot of room for helping people sleep better. I'm curious what your own sleep practice is and before you do. I'll share my own and some of the ways that I work on it. My wife gets very jealous of me. Sleep happens because basically I can fall asleep in like two minutes when I try. There are some occasions where I'm just like so many thoughts coming through and I can't sleep. And in those occasions I love to do very simple breathing exercises. So just counting my breath in and counting it out, that just knocks me out or just doing some sort of guided meditation also. But I don't like to sleep with technology in my ear. But another thing that I do if I'm feeling like I'm getting less quality sleep over time is I like to do an extended fast. I'm actually in that's interesting. I'm in a second day of a three day fast right now, and I noticed a little bit of brain fog recently. And so when I notice those kinds of things, I like to do a fast. And when I do a fast, I think I'm on like hour 30 something right now. I notice that when I fast for the first 24 hours, I wake up instantly on the second day and it's just way easier for me to wake up. There's no grogginess in the morning. And so that's one reset that I do to help with my own sleeping patterns. Definitely breathing exercises. If you're not trying any breathing exercises or don't use them for sleep and you have one day that you are struggling with sleep, I definitely recommend doing a breathing exercise and research fasting if that's something but I'd love to hear what you like to do.

:: 29:36

Well, it's funny. We're talking about I have sort of a problemated relationship to sleep. I go to sleep quickly and wake up slowly and in between, it's variable. Some days I'll have really great sleep and other days I don't. And I have very active dreams. And the dreams can range anywhere from the kind that I have kind of an unusual relationship to dreams too, and that I sometimes realize I'm having a bad dream and I'll just work myself to waking up because I don't like the dream. So sometimes I'll just become aware I'm dreaming a bad dream and I'll go, oh, I just need to change this up and I'll change the dream. And other times I know I've got to wake myself up. In fact, the other day I had one of those remember the movie Inception, right, where you dream and you dream and you dream? I had a double Inception dream where I woke up and I was still asleep in the dream and I had to wake up again. And then I was still asleep. And finally I forced myself into actual waking, opened my eyes and, oh yeah, here's a bedroom. Now I know it's real. I have those kinds of strange phenomena happen in my sleep sometimes. But overall, I don't have a lot of super sophisticated rituals around it. I developed one whenever I was younger that I use sometimes where I just imagine when I'm having trouble sleeping or going to sleep, I imagine climbing a ladder and it's very repetitive. It's just like climb, climb, climb. And eventually I get to where I just keep I lose awareness that I'm with my intention and I'm asleep.

:: 31:26

Very cool. It sounds like you can lucid dream or something like that.

:: 31:31

Yeah. I have Lucid dreams. I have a relationship to dreams where I have a little, how should I say, the physics of dreams. There's things about physics in dreams that's different. Like, have you ever noticed that? Have you ever been in a dream where you look at a clock or you read a book and then you look at it again and it's never the same?

:: 31:53

Good at lucid dreaming, I want to become more proficient at it. And I think there's some interesting things in the future for I met this founder that's basically doing some sort of dream university, helping people manage their dreams. And so I think that it's a fascinating space. And I also heard from I forget who it was, but it was like one of the top engineers at Google. This is going to sound crazy to some people, but he said that he works in his dreams and solves problems. So he lucid dreams and gets work done. But I want to leverage that time too. It's completely unleveraged time.

:: 32:52

Extra work done.

:: 32:54

Maybe not work, just figure out life stuff.

:: 32:57

Even in my dreams, I'm always trying to find. I have a recurring theme in my dreams where I'm like, I have like a room full of stuff. Like I've been in some hotel or retreat or some comfort center for like a year and my room is full of stuff and suddenly it's the day to go home and I'm going, I have a room full of stuff. How am I going to get all this to the airport? And I'm trying to figure out where the terminal is and how to pack all this stuff. I have that dream all the time. And so I actually went on a mission. It's like, okay, I'm going to make myself I'm going to wish myself into having the dream where I actually get the ticket and I just leave all the stuff behind because I just wanted the experience in my dream of going home, getting there. And I achieved that for a little while and that was great. But now I'm back to having the room full of stuff and it's time to go dream.

:: 34:02

I do think it's important to have some sort of consciousness around dreams in general. I remember one time a bunch of years ago, I had a bad dream and I noticed that it was impacting my day life and I brought my emotion that I felt in the dream to externally. So that's one of the reasons why I think it's important to bring mindfulness to your emotions and the dream state.

:: 34:30

Yeah, no doubt. I have very serious dreams where I have emotional, quasi spiritual experiences that stay with me for days and days. There's something going on there that's unusual. And I'd like to know more about dream and sleep health. So to the degree that there's tech around to facilitate that, I'm all about that. So I'm looking forward to anything. Let me know if you find anything useful about dimension and I'll post it to the readers as well to followers of the show.

:: 35:07

Well, yeah, basically they're bringing a lot of mindfulness based practices to help people with sleep. So that was the transition into how mindfulness is connected to sleep. So definitely something to explore there.

:: 35:21

Well, right, because I think that when you do mindfulness practices, you're changing your neurology and that's going to impact your experiences not only everywhere in your life and that includes sleep. So that'd be very interesting to see research around sleep and mindfulness. Like, does it change your dreams or does it change your quality? I don't think there's been much done in that area.

:: 35:47

I don't think so either. But definitely I remember hearing a scientist talk about how our dream time is going to be one of the next frontiers.

:: 35:59

Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. So what's next? I know you've got some big announcements you can't reveal yet, but what's lighting you up these days? Where's your frontier?

:: 36:16

My frontier? Well, as a founder, I think it's important to continually find those and build. Those up yourself. And so it's an interesting question to think about. Really what motivates me is just that I'm working on a positive impact idea and project.

:: 36:43

Yeah.

:: 36:44

And past that, the impact that we make with people is awesome. Getting feedback from folks, definitely. You hear that a lot, really? From a lot of different founders. Like when the people using their platform are working with them. Share testimonials. It's really a great way to motivate yourself.

:: 37:07

It's true.

:: 37:08

Or get motivated.

:: 37:09

Yeah, definitely.

:: 37:12

I wouldn't be working in the same direction we're working if we weren't seeing positive impacts. So what I can share is that there are a lot of great areas that we're exploring and we're excited to soon double down on the right place.

:: 37:32

Beautiful. Well, I'm excited to see what you do next and I really appreciate you being on the show. It's always a blast to talk with you and we never know where we're going to go, but that's part of the fun. So thank you for taking time to be on the show today and appreciate so much your work. And I'm looking forward to the next cohort of The Mindful Coach Association, which is going to know The Mindful Coach Association once again. So blessings to you and thank you for being here.

:: 38:00

Thank you, Brett. Great to chat.