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When we are really honest with ourselves, we may have to admit that there are far too many times when we feel as though we’re spending the day putting out fires and wasting time rather than doing our best work.
It took a personal crisis, but I discovered that mindfulness training would teach me to find more of the very thing we need most in our lives: space.
It’s a methodology that trains a capacity of your mind that generally receives little or no training.
also train your mind to strengthen its capabilities.
We have the innate ability to be fully present for those tough decisions—for all of our decisions—but we need to notice when we are moving into a reactive mode and learn practices
that will help us make conscious choices.
When you are mindful of this moment, you are present for your life and your experience just as it is …
The best leaders are women and men who have first-class training, bright minds, warm hearts, a passionate embrace of their mission, a strong connection to their colleagues and communities, and the courage to be open to what is here. They’re driven to excellence, innovation, and making a difference.
We often simply do not have the space, the breathing room, necessary to be clear and focused, and to listen deeply to ourselves and to others.
We can no longer afford to miss the connections with those we work with, those we love, and those we serve.
A mindful leader embodies leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion in the service of others.
Leadership presence is a tangible quality. It requires full and complete nonjudgmental attention in the present moment. Those around a mindful leader
see and feel that ...
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That’s leadership presence: you give your full attention to what you’re doing, and others know it.
Your full attention—mind, body, and heart—was completely absorbed in that moment.
continuous partial attention.
Neuroscience is now showing us that the mind’s capacity for multitasking is extremely limited. We’re really built for doing one thing at a time.
Today, few if any connections are made, as everyone rushes down the hall with thumbs blazing on smartphones. As a result, everyone arrives at the next meeting still attached to the last one. We lead hurried, fractured, complex lives, and we seem to be more easily losing the richness and engagement that come from being in the present moment. With all the many ways we are enticed to get distracted, to drown out our intuition, and to fragment our attention,
While the primary aim of bringing mindfulness to our leadership practices and habits is not to improve our physical health and well-being, the personal experiences of many thousands of mindfulness practitioners—as well as the results of numerous studies—have demonstrated that our health does improve in a variety of ways. The shorthand phrase for the health benefits of mindfulness practice is “stress reduction.”
What we call stress is a complex
system within our body and mind, and we need stress to respond effectively to challenges, threats, and emergencies. But when our body and mind are in a constant state of high stress reactivity, it takes its toll. One of the key health benefits of mindfulness is that it helps us better regulate for ourselves our stress response. In addition, increased awareness of the condition of our b...
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I learned that most of us spend our entire lives distracting ourselves and thinking so much about our past and our future that we end up missing the present moment, the only moment we have to live and the only moment we can affect.
Second is the ability of a leader to skillfully initiate or guide change.
four fundamentals of leadership excellence: focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion.
Cultivating our ability to develop greater clarity applies not only to seeing clearly the events and environment around us, but also to seeing ourselves more clearly. As we begin to notice, for example, our own reactivity to certain situations, and the various ways in which our conditioning and education may be filtering out some of what we need to see, we often make important discoveries. Those discoveries can often lead us to make important changes.
We need leaders who are aware of their own filters and conditioning. We need them to notice the critical voice in their head, their fears of the unknown, their discomfort with risks, their fear of failure, and their propensity to seek the safety of old models.
Creative solutions and ideas have a better chance of arising when the mind is not constantly busy with to-do lists.
Compassion reminds us that when we see someone suffering, we are separated from the sufferer by only the thinnest lines of time and circumstance, and we feel a pull to lessen the suffering.
It’s hard to alleviate that suffering when you don’t even see that
you are the cause of it.
compassion cannot truly be offered to others until we first offer it to ourselves.
As a leader, your best hope for influencing in an innovative and authentic way begins with becoming fully aware of who you are, and then seeing clearly what is around you.
the attention wanders and redirect it. The redirection is the practice. This is how you begin to train the mind to sustain attention at other times of the day when you’re not engaged in the daily meditation practice.
you learn to notice when you are physically in one place and mentally in another.
With mindfulness practice, you can begin to strengthen your capacity to pay attention and begin to learn more about what it means to be present.
Move your attention next to the tops of your feet, ankles, lower legs, knees, and so forth. Gradually scan through your body, noticing sensations, noticing discomfort, and noticing areas of your body where you detect an absence of sensations. You simply don’t notice any sensations in your shoulders right now, for example. No need to search for sensations; just keep scanning through your body, taking your time and being open to what is here.
Perhaps our overscheduled, nonstop existence leaves no space for the attention required to care well for ourselves. Or maybe a penchant for doing things perfectly leaves little time for being sick.
Perhaps in that small amount of downtime, the messages of the body that were drowned out during the week had a chance to be heard.
If we stop for a moment to consider this scenario, we realize that when the sensations are ignored for too long, the body may keep
turning up the volume until it can’t be drowned out, and at that point it can mean a very serious...
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We know we are capable of meeting life in a more attentive and compassionate way, but we may believe it is not possible in the speed and complexity of today.
To counteract this gnawing feeling of needing space and time, you need to find ways to create it. Your life is not likely to lose its complexity anytime soon, and you don’t need your life to become less complex in order to make moments of space in your day. You can create those moments of space by regularly taking what I refer to as a purposeful pause.
The sensations you notice in your chest as your ribs expand with the breath can only be felt right now, with the breath of this moment. When you intentionally bring your attention to sensations and sounds, you become more awake to what is all around you and what you feel inside yourself.
From the stillness of a pause, the next moment flows with greater clarity and warmth and inspiration.
So she began to take a few moments before her next meeting to close the screen on her computer and use a purposeful pause to mentally prepare.
gave each person a notebook to place alongside his or her computer and asked them to block out at least a half hour each week to use as a dedicated open space. During the week, as employees noticed something they wished they had more time to explore, they would jot it down in the notebook. Then, when they reached the blocked-out time in the week, they could return to the notebook and choose to attend to one or more of the items.
The practice of intentionally blocking out open space became a key element in helping the group to see what benefits for innovation can accrue from having some breathing space, rather than just hoping that it will emerge entirely on its own from the maelstrom of the daily work world.
The decline seemed based more on Catherine’s attitude than on her capability. Catherine was in trouble, and the mentoring program was the last attempt to try to help her job performance improve. If Beth’s mentoring wasn’t successful, this young woman would be terminated.
reduce the noise and capture the signal.
mindful communication methodology
