Marc Lesser's Blog, page 30

Pain and Possibility

When I was CEO of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, I was invited to attend a dinner in Madison, Wisconsin. I was part of a gathering of scientists, leaders, and teachers and it was the evening before a scheduled talk by the Dalai Lama. I was fortunate enough to be assigned a seat next to Bill George, author of Discover Your True North and a professor at the Harvard Business School. During our dinner conversation, he shared some experiences of working closely with numerous Fortune 500 CEOs and high-level executives.

Bill was surprised to discover a pattern in nearly all of the leaders he worked with — in order to shift from being a good leader to becoming a great one, it was necessary for them to get in touch with their own deep sense of pain, vulnerability, humility, and occasionally a deep sense of shame. This might mean simply acknowledging the pain of being human, or the pain of feeling like they had let others down. Or it could be pain from difficult, imperfect childhoods, failed relationships, or traumatic events.

Like many of us, the leaders he came into contact with tended to cover up their pain rather than open to it. But when they allowed themselves to experience their pain, these executives were able to get a glimpse of how freeing up energy and feelings that were being held close allowed them to be more authentic, caring, and effective leaders.

I’m often asked why we’re seeing upsurge in interest in mindfulness, meditation, and emotional intelligence among executives and business people. My two-word answer to this question is Pain and Possibility:

 

the pain of what isn’t working, the pain of change, and ultimately the pain of sickness, old age, and death; the pain of being human is something we all know…
which leads to possibility; by acknowledging, embracing, and learning from our pain, we can find a deeper sense of satisfaction, joy, and forge more intimate, connected relationships – at work and in all parts of our lives.

There is SO much possibility, to find joy and connection in the midst of our suffering, and to work toward greater understanding and compassion, toward solving the real world problems of injustice and inequity.

The post Pain and Possibility appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Interview: That Got Me Thinking

Marc Lesser speaks with Ellie Newman on the That Got Me Thinking podcast about the challenging paradoxes that we experience on our individual and collective journeys in life, and how to live a more conscious, authentic life. You can listen to the conversation below.

The post Interview: That Got Me Thinking appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Audio: Connect to the Pain of Others

In this 5-minute guided meditation, Marc Lesser teaches the practice of Connecting to the Pain of Others, the fifth of the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, in which we learn how to increase connection and trust in relationships. Drop in and listen as Marc shares a moving poem about unity, oneness, and opening our hearts by Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

Below you’ll find options to listen to the meditation with or without music. Marc collaborated with his son, Jason, on producing the meditation track and accompanying music. You can learn more about Jason’s work at www.dream-tape.com.

WITH MUSIC

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/marc-lesser/7PracticesAudio/5_CONNECT_WITH_THE_PAIN_OF_OTHERS_MUSIC.mp3

WITHOUT MUSIC

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/marc-lesser/7PracticesAudio/5_CONNECT_WITH_THE_PAIN_OF_OTHERS.mp3

The post Audio: Connect to the Pain of Others appeared first on Marc Lesser.

3 practices for simplifying your life

Harry Roberts was one of my teachers and mentors when I lived at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. He was trained as a Yurok shaman and was incredibly knowledgeable about California native plants. He also taught me how to weld, and some important lessons regarding paying attention to what is most essential. Harry liked to boil almost any instruction down to 3 essential tasks:

The first, and not necessarily most important task, is to quiet the busyness in your mind.

The second is to find your song.

The third is to sing that song.

These 3 tasks are a powerful and practical expression of the seventh practice of a mindful leader: Keep Making it Simpler. This “formula” invites us to transform any feeling of busyness into composure so that we can focus on results that matter.

3 Practices to Keep Making It Simpler

1. Have a regular meditation practice of quieting your mind, even if it’s for a few minutes. If possible, sit with others. 

Harry spoke simply and directly about the practice of mindfulness long before that word came into more popular use. Mindfulness begins by noticing how busy our minds are, how easily and habitually our minds jump from thought to thought, often residing in the past or in the future – anywhere but right here, right now. Quieting the mind generally begins with taking the time to be still, to be quiet, so we can pay attention to the breath and body.

This process is like applying WD-40 to our minds. Increasing our awareness and paying conscious attention to our inner and outer life loosens the somewhat hardened or rusted parts of our thinking. Often, without even noticing, we get stuck in mental habits and assumptions that underlie and drive our thinking.  Applying some attention can loosen these patterns. This can mean increasing our ability to either narrow or expand our focus – whichever is most effective and refreshing to our habitual ways of thinking. Quieting the busyness in our mind can open the door to experiencing the sacredness of life in general and our own wondrous life even in the midst of everyday activities. It is something we can practice at any time, in any moment when we want to let go of the activity-driven busyness that can make us feel so depleted.

2. Find your song by working and living with greater focus, energy, and composure. 

Finding your song describes your ability to access your deep power — which is your appreciation for being alive. This embraces both who you are and all that you have right now as well as the greater possibilities you imagine and envision for the future. We can hear our song more easily when our minds are quiet, when we can reflect on what is truly engaging and important to us — what brings us the greatest sense of belonging and of accomplishment. Finding our song means discovering our fierce and tender heart, where we feel deeply connected to all that surrounds us. Though our jobs and professional careers are important, our song is much deeper and wider than our work. Our song includes our way of being in the world, our personal relationships, our daily routines, and how we create a sense of community.

3. Sing your song, by being present, curious, awake, alive. Experience your full experience!

In singing your song results matter. Accomplishment is important. Your observable, concrete actions do have weight. At the same time, I believe part of Harry Roberts’s message is that your song is always available.

You can choose to sing your song — that is, have a positive effect on the task at hand and feel personally productive — anytime and anyplace, in small or large ways. Where you live and work and with whom you work matter tremendously. How you express your deepest longings and intentions is vitally important to enlisting others in your vision and in taking steps toward implementing that vision. Singing your song is simply a rather poetic way of reminding you that no matter what your circumstances are, you can engage them effectively and with as much personal satisfaction as possible.

———

The more we learn to quiet the busyness in our minds, discover our own song, and transform ourselves by expressing it, the easier it will be to accomplish more of what really matters, both for ourselves and for our precious world.

The post 3 practices for simplifying your life appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Talk: Love The Work

In this dharma talk at Green Gulch Farm, a branch of the San Francisco Zen Center, Marc Lesser discusses the practice of “Love the Work” – the first of the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Drawing on his work as a “stealth Zen teacher” in the business world, he explores how this practice teaches us to truly enjoy life, to live our love, and to embrace the work of cultivating awareness and helping others.



The post Talk: Love The Work appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Love The Work

In this dharma talk at Green Gulch Farm, a branch of the San Francisco Zen Center, Marc Lesser discusses the practice of “Love the Work” – the first of the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Drawing on his work as a “stealth Zen teacher” in the business world, he explores how this practice teaches us to truly enjoy life, to live our love, and to embrace the work of cultivating awareness and helping others.



The post Love The Work appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Why You Don’t Need To Be an Expert

When we approach life with a beginner’s mind, we let go of being an expert.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychology professor, describes people as having two distinct selves: the experiencing self and the remembering or narrative self. The experiencing self lives in the moment and in the world of sensations. The narrative self creates stories to make sense of what is experienced. Being an expert is a story, and if our focus is using, displaying, or confirming our expertise, then we are less focused on what’s actually happening in the moment.

Kahneman has conducted a variety of fascinating experiments to clarify the distinction between these two selves as well as to demonstrate conflicts between these parts of us, especially when it comes to the perception of time and how our remembered selves are influenced by what he describes as the peaks and ends of an experience or event. For example, our memory of a vacation may be colored by one or two moments that stand out as strongly positive or negative peaks, as well as by our experience of the last part of the vacation.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman writes:

The two selves are the experiencing self, which does the living, and the remembering self, which keeps score and makes the choices. . . We should not forget, however, that the perspective of the remembering self is not always correct… The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.

As Kahneman points out, the trouble is that these stories are often inaccurate. Not only is our personal perspective limited, so that we never see the whole picture, but even our perspective of our own experience and memories is often biased. As a matter of course, we choose only certain aspects of our experience as important and build a story out of those. In other words, we might assume that we are at least experts about our self, our history, and our identity, but Kahneman makes clear we should be skeptical of that claim as well.

Try this:

See if you can observe the distinction between your experiencing self and your narrative self.

Play with noticing pure experience — in any moment, what do you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch? Then, pay attention to what you remember as important and how you create a narrative or a story that makes sense of yourself, others, and the world.

What can you learn from this, by discerning what you experience from the story that you create about your experience?

The post Why You Don’t Need To Be an Expert appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Connect to Your Pain

Adapted from Practice #4, Connect to Your Pain, in Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader.

When it comes to emotional pain, the strategy I adopted from a very early age was denial and compartmentalization. I grew up with a manic-depressive father, and the tension and anxiety in my house was palpable, yet difficult issues and feelings (any feelings, positive or negative) were rarely addressed. This strategy appeared to be working for my parents, and I felt safe ignoring any emotional tensions in myself and turning my attention outward: to my daily life, to getting good grades, to reading The Hardy Boys and other mystery novels, and so on.

Today, I’ve been practicing Zen meditation for more than forty years. I teach mindfulness and emotional intelligence to leaders and businesspeople around the world. I often divulge to those I am teaching how strange I feel at times, how I struggle in my own life as a leader, husband, and father to embody emotional intelligence. I sometimes divulge that my wife thinks it is rather odd that I am teaching emotional intelligence.

To counteract my tendency to compartmentalize and to avoid stress and pain, I’ve taken on a practice I call feeling miserable on purpose. About once a month during my morning meditation, I deliberately and consciously allow myself to open to all my stress, pain, and discomfort. I think about and feel all of the sadness and emptiness in my own life, in the lives of people around me, and in the world. I just let it all in, as fully and deeply as I can. Strong emotions and tears arise and I embrace them. They come and they go. Often these strong feelings of pain are followed by strong feelings of appreciation and connection.

When we let ourselves feel the depths of our suffering, paradoxically, we may discover that this space is rather full — full of a deep connection with ourselves and with others; full of hope and meaning, beyond our usual thinking minds.

In truth, pain isn’t always quite the right word when it comes to this practice. Empty at times may be better. Connect to the emptiness, sadness, and lack of control that defines the human condition. This universal pain may be experienced as the pain of our essential aloneness, the pain of change, or the pain that comes from avoiding or resisting change. The pain of not getting what we want or of getting what we don’t want. The pain of not being able to control our lives; the pain of aging and of sickness. The pain of wanting to protect our children, families, and friends and knowing that we can’t shield anyone from sadness, change, and loss, even ourselves. The pain of unfairness, poverty, cruelty, and violence, both what we witness and what we read or hear about in the world. Finally, it is the pain of knowing that we will lose everything and everyone; people we know will die. We will die.

This is what I mean by the practice “Connect to your pain.” The surprise, however, and what Bill George, author of Discover Your True North and a professor at the Harvard Business School, has seen in the leaders he’s worked with, is that what might appear as painful and uncomfortable often holds what is most important in our lives. When we face, feel, and connect with discomfort, we often experience what we most need to learn, what is most meaningful. Turning toward and connecting to my own pain has been essential in helping me discover what is most important, whether in leadership roles or in any part of my life. This is the benefit of the fourth practice, and I’ve found it true for me again and again…….

Try this: Sometime this week, when you are feeling that something is missing, or lonely, or sad, see if you can explore it. Instead of pushing these feelings away or distracting yourself, stay with the feelings and sensations. What is it like? How does it feel in the body?

The post Connect to Your Pain appeared first on Marc Lesser.

What Leadership Stories Do you Tell?

One of my favorite exercises when coaching executives is to ask them to describe their work, or a particular project or key relationship, from 2 perspectives:

the perspective of failure (what’s lacking, not going well, and/or failing) and,
the perspective of success (what’s working well, going better than expected).

I find value in doing this exercise myself. I can describe my work life as incredibly successful or as lacking (or even failing). On the one hand, I’ve founded and been CEO of 3 companies – that feels successful! On the other, all of the companies grew more slowly than originally projected, and one nearly went bankrupt when the 2001 dot-com bubble burst – failure! I have led mindfulness trainings worldwide, and lead an engaging weekly meditation group; I’ve helped lots of people – success! But there’s so much suffering and need in this world and I’ve barely made a dent in that – fail.

The point of this exploration is to foster greater insight and a more realistic perspective on the stories that we tell ourselves, and the myriad, often harsh judgments we make about ourselves. This exercise can help shift our perspective from the more fixed mindset of labels and judgment to a more open, curious, and resilient way of being. It can help cultivate more of a “beginner’s mind” – a mind of curiosity, appreciation, and learning.

When we approach life with a beginner’s mind, we let go of being an “expert.” Experts want to know; they want to be right. They routinely ask themselves: Am I succeeding or failing? But imagine for a moment if you approached your work like a beginner and gave up the need to be an expert. Imagine if you relaxed the need to feel safe, right, and important.

It may sound counterintuitive but this can actually bolster our confidence, flexibility, and effectiveness. This is true when it comes to leadership, healthy relationships, meditation practice, and enjoying and appreciating this human life. Curiosity, openness, and being aware of how much we don’t know are considerably more effective strategies than attempting to become an expert, then having to constantly prove or defend our expertise.

This attitude can also be useful when giving or receiving feedback. Often when I’m teaching or giving talks I like to ask 3 questions:

What worked well?
What could have been better?
What surprised you?

These questions help me to move toward a more open, beginner’s-mind-way of improving my work.

So, with this in mind – ask yourself this question: would you rather be focused on an outcome or the conscious experience in any given situation? What story do you tell yourself, and others, about your wins, your losses, and your experiences along the way when you consider your work, your relationships, and your life? Could it be time to change “the moral” of your story?

The post What Leadership Stories Do you Tell? appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Meditation: Taking the Backward Step that Turns Your Light Inward

An excerpt from Practice #2 – Do the Work – in Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader.

Several years ago I co-led a one-day Search Inside Yourself program for Google’s doctors and health care providers. My co-teacher was a Google employee whom I had trained as a Search Inside Yourself teacher. After introducing the topics of mindfulness and emotional intelligence, my co-teacher described the process of meditation as bringing attention to the breath, noticing distraction, and then returning attention to the breath. Then he used the metaphor that “meditation is much like going to the gym” – each time you bring your attention back to your breath, you are improving your ability to focus, like strengthening a muscle as you repeat this process again and again.

I thanked my co-teacher and said that while I agreed with this metaphor, it is also true that “meditation is nothing like going to the gym.” My co-teacher was a bit surprised. He smiled, looked at me, and said enthusiastically to the participants, “Well, that’s why we have two teachers!” Fortunately, we had a really good, trusting relationship, as I had been mentoring him for the past year, and he was not put off by my contradiction.

I clarified that going to the gym implies that you are meditating to get a result and that you expect a step-by-step improvement. This can be useful, and encouraging, and it can also be a hindrance to the real power and benefits of meditation practice.

Another approach to meditation is to completely let go of all reasons and rationales for meditating, giving up any ideas or hopes of improving or getting anything. Instead, as you meditate, see what it is like to just be quiet, still, and alive, just appreciating your experience, seeing yourself and accepting yourself as you truly are.

Here is what Dōgen, founder of Zen in Japan in the 13th century, had to say about meditation practice:

“The sitting practice I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the gate of repose and bliss, the practice/realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it. Once its heart is grasped, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains.

You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly.”

I love Dōgen’s poetic description of meditation, and his deep sense of knowing, speaking from the depth of his own experience. He is saying that, in meditation, there is nothing to gain or achieve; just this act of stopping, breathing, and letting go of everything breaks down and transcends our ideas of what practice is and what realization or self-actualization are.

In the Zen tradition, “take the backward step” refers to a deep sense of letting go and is the opposite of trying to gain something. It is a much-revered instruction for meditation practice, as it “is simply the gate of repose and bliss.” Of course, this might not be your (and it is not my) day-to-day experience of meditation. But why not? What gets in the way? Dōgen’s words are meant, I believe, to be aspirational and practical: they shift our assumptions regarding both meditation practice, and our lives.