Developing a sustainable meditation practice is hard. So hard, in fact, that when I start working with executives, most tell me that they’ve tried meditating, but only a very few report having a regular practice. This isn’t because they don’t see benefits. Many say things like, “I noticed a clear difference in how my day went when I started it with meditation — I would be more focused and less likely to get sidetracked.” Or, “On days I practice meditation, stresses would more easily flow off me.”

Still, very few of these executive stuck with it, because they struggled to find the time (“I did my meditation for two weeks, then work got really busy and I fell off the bandwagon”) or because after a while they felt their practice “wasn’t working” or that “my mind was just too busy to quiet down.”

A lot has been said about the importance of mindfulness and how to practice it in the workplace, but the advice doesn’t always address how to develop a sustainable practice over time. I’ve identified four actions that can help.

[Here’s the first.]

Find a Community

The popularity of meditation apps in the past decade has given rise to the idea that meditation should be practiced individually. And most executives I work with these days started their meditation practice by themselves, often following instructions in an app. The greatest advantage of this trend is accessibility: Anyone can take up meditating with a few clicks on their phone, on their own time.

But for millennia, meditation has largely been practiced in communities. In Buddhism, they’re called sanghas. Such groups provide two main benefits. First, there’s accountability, because the group meets at a particular date and time. Second, there’s social support in the form of inspiration through others’ progress and the understanding that the challenges you face are shared by others.

Most executives I know who have established a regular meditation practice have found and sustained some form of community. For some, these are traditional communities, such as the local Vipassana or Zen center (which is where I found my community). Others have found or created communities within their professional organizations, such as Chade-Meng Tan’s group at Google. Some communities work across organizations, such as the Mindful on Wall Street initiative, founded by executives from Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, DWS, Goldman Sachs, and the Ford Foundation. Several hundred bankers join the group’s weekly meditations via conference call. Alice Kim, an executive director at Morgan Stanley and one of the founders, explains, “I have found there is something about the gathering of a like-minded group with a shared intention that allows individuals to find quietude and spaciousness very quickly.”