This episode of Break into Law School is all about using mindfulness to score higher on your LSAT exam. And I'm so excited that I have with me. Grantly Neely the owner and founder of Granite Test Prep in Nashville, Tennessee, here to talk to us about mindfulness.

You can find Granite's Mindfulness for Academic Achievement Course here: https://granitetestprep.com/mindfulness-for-academic-achievement/

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This episode is all about using mindfulness to score higher on your LSAT exam. I'm so excited that I have with me Grantly Neely, the owner and founder of GRANITE test prep in Nashville, Tennessee, here to talk to us about mindfulness.  

Welcome to another episode of Break into Law School. My name is Sydney Montgomery and I'm a law school admissions consultant specializing in working with first-generation and minority applicants. 

So let's dive in. 

I'm really excited. We are going to touch on three topics. First, we're going to get an overview of what even is mindfulness. Then we're going to get into the nitty-gritty. I'm going to talk to you and Grantly is going to talk to you about how the LSAT exam can be conquered with a little bit of mindfulness. How mindfulness can improve your memory, it can improve your motivation, your focus. It can make you a little sharper and it can help you stay calm under pressure and really kill the questions.

And then we're going to talk to you about how you actually go about incorporating mindfulness in your day, not just for the LSAT, but as a continual practice to allow you to achieve that academic success that I know that you can. I am beyond thrilled that today I get to have a conversation with Grantly Neely. Grantly Neely is the founder of GRANITE, an education center and education technology company, whose primary goal is to integrate mindfulness education into canonical academic disciplines.

Grantly is a certified koru mindfulness instructor, and he has taught mindfulness classes for stress reduction and academic performance at his home-based GRANITE, and also at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth college. I am so thrilled to have Grantly here. So Grantly, thank you. 

Thank you so much, Sydney. This is exciting. 

Yeah. So I just first want to know, how did you get into mindfulness and also, for those listening, what is mindfulness?

 Absolutely. I think I got into mindfulness or heard about it because I, like so many people, didn't really have any idea what it was, but I first learned about it in my freshmen year at Dartmouth College. I was accidentally dropped into a public speaking class where the whole class was all seniors and the registrar had made an error and had accidentally put freshmen Grantly into a class with all seniors. 

 So I was the youth, so I was the youth in the room, and one of the wise seniors, her name was Olivia, thank you, Olivia. She gave an amazing persuasive  speech on why we should all take up in mindfulness practice. And she had a very rich mindfulness practice. We'd say a very knowledgeable person in the mindfulness space.

Generally, she would spend all of her summers at a Buddhist monastery in northern California, if I remember that correctly. But anyway, she had spent a lot of time doing meditation, right?

 So she told us basically all of these health benefits, stress reduction benefits, cognition benefits of mindfulness. And her speech was so persuasive that I immediately decided to try out mindfulness. She gave us just a very simple, in her speech, a little meditation that we could do on our own, a little simple breathing meditation and I started trying it out. And as many people experience with mindfulness, the first time they try it, it seemed good, but kind of like, no, okay. Yeah, that kind of does something, I guess. Sure. And then probably for about a year of just kind of experimenting with it and being like, yeah, that seems fine.

This is probably a good thing to do. Sure. It was slowly connecting with me, but not in any kind of earth shattering way. But then as school progressed, as I got older and older in school and class just got harder in school, got more stressful. All of a sudden it started to make more and more sense how mindfulness might fit into specifically the context of academics. In the context of, you know, a tool for academic stress reduction and all of those things. And then slowly developed my own more thorough mindfulness practice.

 Started reading any books I could find on it. And I joined our student mindfulness club and then eventually took on some leadership and became the president of that club.

Eventually by senior year of undergrad, I was working with the administration and we were looking at mindfulness as an intervention, specifically for academic stress reduction and how maybe through that academic stress reduction, we could work together to reduce some kind of unhealthy behaviors on campus and all the sort of unhealthy things that pop out of excessive academic stress.

So we were looking at that as some kind of intervention, some sort of way of mediating that effect. I was so excited by all that, that after graduation, I decided that I might go ahead and try and start a mindfulness based education center and I also really love technology and I came up well, I guess not a hobby software creator anymore cause we do have software products, but at the time I was a hobby software developer. And so started planning out some apps and stuff as well. So that's the basic overview, I guess, of how it all got started.

That makes a lot of sense. I wanted to touch on a few points. I love that you said it really helped you with academic stress reduction, but also I really love that you admit that the first few times you were doing it, it didn't really make an earth shattering impact. I know a lot of times I try to tell my students who are stressed, mostly about the LSAT exam, have you tried Calm? Have you tried Headspace? Have you tried insight timer?  Those meditation apps, and I think honestly, I'll be real with myself. I am always like, Oh, I should meditate every day. But then I don't, Alexa reminds me repeatedly because I set a daily reminder to tell me to meditate.

 Alexa reminds me everyday at noon that it's time to meditate. She just opens the Headspace app and I usually close it because I'm busy. So the question that I really had is if a student is thinking about mindfulness, is it just meditation? Is that what they mean when they say mindfulness? Are they synonymous? Is there more to mindfulness than just doing Headspace or Calm or insight timer? 

Yeah, that is a phenomenal question. I think there is some debate as to how broad of a term, how broadly we want to use mindfulness.

 I've heard lots of. Expert researchers speak to this. And so I'll say first,  meditation comes from this really, really long historic tradition in Buddhism exploring the mind. Then mindfulness I think is something that we use more broadly here in our Western society, contemporary, to describe a practice that could involve meditation, but also could involve some other stress reduction approaches. 

It could have you integrating some yoga, there's mindful walking, mindful, eating all things that have historically sort of also integrated within a meditation practice. But I think mindfulness is used slightly more broadly and it often has a secular connotation, right? 

Sometimes people get uncomfortable with the term meditation because it feels like there may be some kind of religious element that maybe they're not comfortable with, or maybe they're another religion and they don't necessarily want to engage with that.

I'll speak more to that in a second, but I think mindfulness has a broadly secular implication and an implication that includes more than necessarily a seated meditation and practice. Now what I will say, because a lot of people, I hear this all the time, they say, well, for me, mindfulness is going on a walk and relaxing, and I think that's true. I think that's great. I am all for going on a walk and relaxing. I think that is an incredibly valuable part of your practice. However, I think it is super important as well, if you want to explore mindfulness, to remember the value of a seated meditation practice as well. 

There are certain things that, again, this is well-researched, that the science is really not up hand-waving and up for debate. The science is pretty clear that certain types of seated meditation practices, seated mindful meditation practices have really, really, really incredible benefits for cognition, pain, management, anxiety, depression, all these host of things that can really cause some real frustration in an academic context. 

Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense and you touched a little bit on the religious aspect. You know, I have a podcast, mindful prayers for students, which is coming from a Judeo-Christian faith, I'm Christian. The prayers are Christian, but I also mention very explicitly in the podcast that whether you are coming from that tradition or you just like mindfulness, the prayers and the the spirit of the podcast can be calming no matter what religion you are. 

 I have students that listen to the podcast who are atheist, who are Hindu, who are like a whole host of things. So can you talk a little bit about the interplay of people's perceptions of meditation and religion a little bit?

 Yeah. So I think that's a great question. What I think is interesting about mindfulness within the context of religion is the degree to which you can draw some value framework from the practice and the degree to which it can also, independently

of Buddhism, I've heard so many students who believe that and find that it can fortify and augment their own religious practice internally, right? Because if you were going through and practicing an exercise that is training awareness, training appreciation, it's training focus, all of these great things, it is going to allow you to engage more intimately with your own faith, right? 

It will empower you in that way. Now, again, I think you said it's amazing your channel has all sorts of different people of different faiths watching your mindfulness space prayers. and I think again, if you start engaging with this practice, exploring this practice, I think you will find that it will, no matter what your kind of faith background is, or even lack of faith, I think it will give you a sort of richness.

 It takes a little bit of time, right? One meditation will probably not help you discover this richness, but I think with a little bit of time, it will help you discover richness that you might find very powerful within any of that kind of faith-based framework.

I love that. I think that's really good advice. I think that's so true. Now you said one meditation probably want to help you discover this richness. Not that I want to put a prescriptive number on it but, future lawyers, they tend to like things laid out. So if you were advising someone who was saying, okay, yes, I want to start our mindfulness practice.

What does that look like? Does it need to be 30 minutes every day, three times a week, 10 minutes, five minutes? How often, how much? If you're busy, you're trying to juggle a lot of things, you're working, you're studying. What is the kind of minimum that you can answer into on a regular basis, perhaps, to start to feel some of these benefits of mindfullness?

Yeah. I love that question. And I actually like being rather prescriptive with this, I often tell students this, I have a specific number that I give people. So, I'm excited. All our future lawyers, I hope you appreciate this very definitive answer. Because I think it's valuable.

 It takes time as with any exercise, right? If you want to go to the gym and get more fit, it will take time.

One trip to the gym won't do it. But here's what I saw. This is from my personal experience. It's anecdotal. I think there is some research to back it up and I will speak to the research in a second, but from my own experience, what I did broadly said, if you practice 10 minutes a day, that's a good place to get started.

 You know, people are always saying, I do 30 minutes, I do 40 minutes. 10 minutes a day, it's a great place to get started. Every day would be ideal. So if you do 10 minutes a day, every day for 30 days, that's when for me, I kind of finally got in a little bit of a rhythm where I did that

and at the end of the 30 days, I was like, Ooh, I'm feeling like a lot sharper, like I'm kind of quicker than I used to be. This is good. It was kind of like, wow, nice. This is working for me. I would always tell people, if you make it through those first 30 days of practicing every day for 10 minutes and you see that kind of increase in sharpness,

that increase in calmness, that kind of a little boost in memory, all of that stuff. Once you hit that point, you'll be like, okay. Yep, yep, yep. Sign me up. I'm good. This is clearly worth it let's go. But you have to get over that hurdle, right? Our brains  respond to this practice based on the fact that our brains have neuroplasticity, right? Our brains can literally rewire themselves as we do this practice, but as with any kind of practice, as with learning anything, if I play guitar once a month, I'm never going to really learn how to play guitar very well. However, if you want to break through that, you need more frequency. Again, if you can't make it every single day, that's okay. Try it every other day, but more than, you know, once a month.

You're going to start seeing that neuro-plasticity kick in, the brain's going to start rewiring and you're gonna feel, again, it's not going to be crazy, right?  This is not some kind of like, you're going to be a completely new human and never be the same again. That's not the idea.

It's just going to be these really minor, subtle pleasant adjustments. You'll see that and then you'll be probably about as convinced as I was, and then it becomes much easier to keep moving that way. 

You said it makes you sharper, it increases your memory. Can we talk about how we can apply this to test prep?

 So many students are studying for the LSAT exam. It's such a large determiner for many students about where they go to law school and there's a lot of anxiety and there's a lot of burnout and I feel like those two kind of feed on each other. So how can mindfulness specifically help with that test anxiety, that burnout, that feeling of I'm studying, I'm studying, I'm studying, nothing's working, my scores aren't going up, I'm taking practice test after practice test. I've paid for this tutor. I've paid for this test prep. And I'm like basically at the same place. How can we infuse mindfulness into that to break that pattern? 

So here's how I like to explain to students. I think this is incredibly useful for LSAT, MCAT, GRE, any test you're taking. This kind of framework of thinking about it is going to be important when you are preparing for a test, right?

You are going to be learning test content. It's logic, reasoning problems, maybe math problems, maybe vocabulary, depends slightly on the test, but ultimately it is going to be the static body of content. And problem solving skills that you need for that assessment. That is the test content, but there's this whole other world in standardized tests, a world that here at GRANITE, we like to refer to as the test taking intangibles.

Those are things like your ability to stay calm when things are not going exactly on the test as you might like them to, your ability to stay focused when things are getting boring, your ability to stay enthusiastic and motivated when you are not feeling such, those are really important as well. When you prepare for any test, if you only focus on one of those, you're only focusing on 50% of the test, right?  If you said I'm going to study for 50% of this test and my scores aren't going up, nobody would be surprised. 

But if you think about this test as both of these are equal parts, and maybe for some people they're slightly more one way or the other, but they're both large parts of this test and we need to prepare for both of them. It will really redefine the way you think of this. Another kind of metaphor I often like to use is a sports metaphor.

Let's say you are an athlete and you're preparing for sport. We'll just pick on tennis here.

You would spend time learning how to hit a tennis ball. You would get hand-eye coordination to make contact with the ball, to get it into court, all of that stuff, right, to hit good forehands, a good surf. That's all great. However, if you have really bad cardio and you're very out of shape and you get tired really easily and things like that, it will be hard to win a very long competitive tennis match, right?

And even though you have an amazing forehand, or a great server, great skills. You're going to get fatigued, burnt out, worn out and not be able to win the match. This is the same thing here in an academic context, right? The mindfulness that we're using for test prep is essentially the cross training that we're using in sports.

If you aren't doing these brain training exercises, these exercises to boost our test taking intangibles here. If you're not doing that, you are leaving some of your cross training out on the side, you're kind of not paying attention to it. And oftentimes that is low hanging fruit, if you will, to kind of start working with, you know, 10 minutes a day is probably a lot less time you're spending with a lot of your test content. And so if you take advantage of that and say, okay, I'm probably going to be preparing for this test for two months, maybe even more, all sorts of durations. If you say, I'm gonna be spending an hour a day doing this content, this the kind of the content of the test, adding an extra 10 minutes a day in for something like mindfulness, it's going to be pretty trivial.

It's not going to be a huge, extra time ask, but I think what you're going to do then is you're going to see there's a whole half of this test you are then going to be able to really bring to the next level. 

Really love that. I know I have students that could benefit,  from this mindfulness practice, I believe it probably would help a lot for writer's block.

When we're talking about writing these essays and brainstorming and structuring, I feel like having the right mindset for all of that is crucially important. Is there ever an age that's too young to start a mindfulness practice or too old?  So does it matter, these techniques, how old you are? 

It does not matter and I will actually send you to anyone who's  a biological research nerd. I can show you some neuroplasticity evidenced specifically that this is valuable, no matter how old you get. It's also very valuable no matter how young you are.

I can say at our center, we have students as young as four and five learning mindfulness all the way up to we've had students here, likewise that are in their fifties. We find that the brain has plasticity for far longer than we think.

So, no matter how old you are, there's this opportunity to do this retraining that we're talking about. Oftentimes younger students are able to really connect with this practice incredibly well. One of the amazing things about a mindfulness practice is it's challenging, but it's almost challenging in the way that we are getting in our own way.

Oftentimes younger students don't get in their own way as much with this practice and if they start learning it's not really particularly different from learning foreign languages or learning to ride a bike. It seems really easy to learn foreign languages or learn to ride a bike when you're a little kid cause you don't really get in your own way. You just do things. Mindfulness practices are the same way. I would say the younger you start with your child on developing a practice like this as a family, with your younger students, with your younger children, it'll probably be much easier for them down the road to build on this practice and develop its richness as they get older and as they start using it. 

For my students that are listening, they've taken so far that 10 minutes a day of a mindfulness practice now.

And we said it could be meditation, it could be a meditative walk or a mindful eating, but that's seated meditation or seated mindfulness practices. They're like, okay, great. I'm sitting down. What do I do? So they get one of the apps. Do you have courses that walks students through this? What are the ways that they can get involved now that they're sitting down for 10 minutes a day? 

That's a super great question. So we like to do software development here at GRANITE and we do have a couple apps that are specifically geared at mindfulness for academic achievement.

One of them is the courses itself titled mindfulness for academic achievement. How it's structured is it's basically a sequence of nice, short seated meditations where I and my team will explain some of the science behind each of the seated practices, right. It's interesting because different seated practices, research have shown have different effects on our cognition. There's some that are more calming in nature. Some that are more energizing in nature. Some that are better for building focus, some that are better for helping us not to get anxiety.

They have different ones, but this course will walk us through a host of exercises. Talk about the science of each of these exercises, what we can expect out of the exercises. Then it has me running a guided meditation with the student through it. So that's the kind of thing where if you were to sign up for a class like that, you could go ahead, learn about the meditation.

And then just go ahead and play the guided meditation. Sit back, take your 10 minutes, sit through it and there you go. It's pretty easy. It'll expose you to a whole host of different seated practices. They're all research-based seated practices.

 These are going to be the kind of practices that will elicit that boom nice, 30 day, okay I'm feeling sharper sort of effect. I think obviously I'm slightly biased to my own personal tools that I've created, but one of the first resources I looked at was a book and it's called, There's two books actually, I like miracle of mindfulness is one, and mindfulness in every step. That's another nice step-by-step guide. I think books like that are absolutely incredible too. 

Absolutely. 

I think that the course is built to be about an eight week course. A lot of mindfulness research is done with an eight week progression. If you want to condense it a little bit and say, we're going to make this a 40 day thing or a 30 day thing. You can certainly do it a little quicker as well and that would be okay. 

Okay. Great. And then after the courses, that's knowledge that stays with them, they don't need to do a second course or where do they go?

I think that's a super good question as well. I like to say that these courses are living, breathing things because we're constantly adding new meditations to them, adding new research that our team here has found.

The other thing is just maintaining that practice, right? If you do connect with it and you do find that this is a practice you like, and it's a practice that is helping you achieve what you want to, I think it's good to continue with that practice.

Awesome. This has been really informative for myself. It's challenged me. It's inspired me. Is there anything else that you want to share?

I think that is great.  You can check out all of our courses.

We have courses for specific standardized tests, general mindfulness. See what happens if you say 10 minutes a day, 30 days, just see what happens. I think my hunch is that if you stick to it, you will see something striking, but I'd also like to challenge somebody. If you do stick to it 30 days, 10 minutes a day, and nothing happens.  That's great. I want to know about that as well. So whatever happens, take the challenge. 

I love that challenge. 

I'm excited to hear from you Sydney, how it goes.

 I don't do it regularly, but the few times that I actually do it, I usually feel calmer in my day.  I absolutely love that you are here with us today. Today, we really hit on three things. We got a really great overview of what mindfulness was. We talked about how mindfulness can help you beat and conquer the LSAT exam, improve your memory, improve your focus, improve your motivation, make you a little bit sharper with just 10 minutes a day of mindfulness practice.

 We really dug into how to start your mindfulness practice, what the resources are that you can use and how you can start incorporating this into your life. I have absolutely loved having Grantly with me today.

 If you're not really sure how to go about law school and maybe you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the process. Reach out to me.

This was another episode of Break into Law School with Sydney Montgomery. 

Want to learn more about how you can work with me? Visit my website at www.smontgomeryconsulting.com or follow me on instagram @smontgomeryconsulting.  

Make sure that you rate and review this episode, if it was helpful to you. And if you're looking for even more inspiration, check out my podcast, Mindful Prayers for Students, where I provide encouragement, mindfulness, and prayer on your academic journey.