Rod Lee specialises in Corporate Work for Stress Management
From advertising to health food store proprietor, masseur to stress management consultant, Rod Lee has seemingly led a life of happenstance. But good luck, coupled with mindfulness, has meant he’s always where he’s supposed to be and he’s always ‘present’.
“Opportunities have arisen for me that have positioned me where I’ve had to make a choice, and that choice has worked out very well for myself,” Rod says rather modestly of his diverse but successful career paths. “I started off in Sydney but I went to the Southern Highlands in 1976. I actually had to create a situation where people wanted to see health foods and buy health foods, so I started a column in the local paper called Good Health, where I’d talk about a vitamin or a certain food and give a recipe, and that then opened up the business and I created a whole market.”
“From that experience I also became a masseur. I sold my health food store and became a masseur and worked for Berida Manor, and then two clients I met at Berida Manor were interested in having home massages in Sydney, so I moved to Sydney, started up a business and within 3 months I had 25 clients a week,” he recalls. A client then asked Rod to run a medical centre dealing with chronic pain and stress. “After three-and-a-half to four years, I moved out of that and started my own business consulting in stress management.”
Never one to be daunted by a challenge, Rod turned one of his biggest fears into the next phase of his life and career. “My biggest fear was probably public speaking. The biggest audience I’ve ever had was probably 250,000 people on Radio National, teaching people meditation one morning,” he recalls. That led to Qantas reaching out to him, and for five years Rod ran their in-flight meditation program as well as on Malaysian Airlines. Since then, Rod has done a lot of corporate work teaching meditation, mindfulness, and resilience.
“To understand yourself you need to be quiet, because we’re always running thoughts through our head. It’s said that we have something like 60,000 thoughts a day, and according to psychology, 80 percent of them are negative. People worry about the future, they’re uncertain about the future and they often reflect on and have guilt about the past; about something they’ve done or got wrong,” Rod states. “Guilt is not a good emotion to have. What you need to have is intelligent regret; recognising that a past mistake wasn’t helpful. And when you have that, you then decide ‘okay, I’m not going to go down that path again because that doesn’t lead to anywhere successful, comfortable or happy’. The most important thing we need is compassion for ourselves and compassion for others.”
“People often think negative behaviour brings a positive result — it never happens that way! Kindness, compassion, understanding, patience are all qualities that bring benefit to ourselves. Anger, frustration, negative thinking create only bad situations for ourselves, so we need to honestly look at ourselves and say ‘Am I feeling frustrated right now? What am I frustrated about? Is it something that I can fix?’ And this comes from an 8th-century Buddhist meditation master from India, Shantideva, who said ‘If something can be fixed, we don’t have to worry. If we can’t fix it, there’s no point in worrying’. So what we do [as people] is fix it or let it go.”
For his coffee fix, Rod travels to Euroespresso in Annandale. “I met Laura, Marcello’s daughter, at a business conference, and she gave me a sample of coffee — and I really like coffee — and I put it in my espresso machine and was blown away! So I came over here to buy my coffee and I interacted with some of the most pleasant people I’ve ever come across in my life,” he says. “I call them my Italian family, because these people look after you better than your own family almost. The hospitality is part of the reason I come here as well as the coffee. One of the reasons I come to this establishment to buy my coffee regularly — pretty much every three weeks — is because I like the environment; I like the attitude of the people here, and the customers as well as the people serving them, and I appreciate the ambience and the brilliance of the coffee. There’s no downside.”
Rod admits he starts his day with herbal tea; coffee is for the afternoon. “I do the ritual of making the best coffee I can make and I sit down with that coffee and drink it mindfully, because that’s the best coffee I’m going to have all day.” That’s very in keeping with Rod’s general approach to life, as are his parting words: “Learn to be present.”
